side notes

I’d just woken up, and I began to record myself explaining my dreams while they were still fresh in my mind. Never mind that it was on an app that doesn’t exist, I didn’t pick up on that, but while telling my dreams I had the idea to do a reality check. I counted six fingers and realized this was a dream!


I put my phone down, walked toward my bedroom door, and told myself out loud, “I am in my house in [town I used to live in].” (I opened the door.) “The dream is clear and stable.”


I chose to go to that house so I could find my parents, because I live alone but had to find a DC so I could complete the TOTM, but why I picked that house specifically, I’m not sure. We moved out of that house in 2013; I didn’t leave home until 2019.


Immediately, my vision became more vivid (I hadn’t realized it before but it was kind of dull color-wise). I was still in my apartment, but standing in front of me was a man.


“Guten Nacht,” I said. (Yes, I meant Guten Tag, but close enough? Autocorrect tried to change this to Gluten Nacho.)


“Guten Nacht,” he replied. He said something else I didn’t understand. The only word I recognized was verstehen (understand), so I assumed he was asking if I understood German. We were entering the dining room now. (I looked up verstehen while typing this; it’s conjugated wrong for second person, but it DOES mean understand. Yay for recognizing one of the handful of German words I know!)


I tried to recall how to tell him I don’t speak German. “No spreche… German. Alemán?” (Alemán means “German” in Spanish.)


“Alemannisch,” he corrected me.


“Deutsch,” I corrected myself. We were in the kitchen now, and I doubted I could carry this conversation further, so I decided to wake up so I could write it down right away.


By the way, it turns out Alemannisch actually refers to a group of Upper German dialects spoken in Switzerland and parts of Germany and Austria—but I didn’t know that, so I’m going to assume my brain just tacked a German suffix onto a Spanish word in an attempt to make it German. Whatever works, right?