The Fourth Factor

In the dream, I seem to have traveled to some sort of large family gathering at an unfamiliar location. It is the last day before we go our separate ways, and so I speak with my aunt and uncle, arranging a time to meet up tomorrow morning, since we’ll be returning together. It’s better to get the planning out of the way now rather than try to do it at the party tonight, I explain.

Later on, I’ve gone somewhere nearby but higher up, by a park on a hill. In the middle of a well-kept green area is a large statue of the Brothers Grimm. There is another green hill off to one side with a row of tiny houses around the base, and stuck into the hillside is a large stone plaque, round with a wavy outline. Across the top, a few names are engraved, and below, a body of text in a smaller size.

There’s a police officer nearby, and I get into a conversation with him. The part of it I can still recall went like this:

“You could live in that house.”

It is the house nearest to us that he’s talking about, a sort of cabin-like structure. The door is wide open, so I can see that it is vacant. I can also see that it is ridiculously tiny, which would probably explain why. I tell him I can’t live possibly there: there isn’t even enough room to lie down inside.

“You could sleep in the park,” he says, undeterred. “And keep food in the house.”

This is a bit odd coming from someone whose job, as I understand it, involves keeping people from sleeping in parks. I must have said something expressing my doubt as to whether that was allowed because he then—in the manner of someone who’s lived in a town all his life and apparently knows everything significant that’s happened there since the dawn of civilization—asks me if I’ve heard of a certain person—a Greek name, but I can’t recall it any longer. I thought I did—a young man, a Greek general from the early 20th century—but he replied that it was actually someone else who was associated with him somehow.

This man, explained the officer, had spent a night sleeping on the statue itself. I look over and see that Wilhelm, on the right, is holding a scroll that looks like it would make a natural perch for the venturesome and bored. And not only did this man not get in trouble for it—the policeman is very emphatic about this—they put his name on the plaque along with the other famous people who had been there to visit the site. The point being, I guess, that nobody would hold it against me, either.

And after that, I was down in the area with my family again until I woke up around four in the morning.

(13.1.18)