Night Vision

It is late at night (or you could also say very early in the morning). I’ve been out dancing somewhere, in an earlier part of the dream I’ve now forgotten, and am now on my way back to my car. Or, at least, it starts off as a car, but then it decides it would rather be a motorbike, and that little segment of the dream replays with the change. It’s in a line of vehicles on one side of a little triangle of parkland where what looks like a wooden caravan is just packing up to go. They seem to have left fliers on the nearby vehicles, so I look at the one on mine - a half-sheet of peachy pink paper that says they’re holding some kind of musical event here tomorrow (as it kind of looks like they’ve done today as well). I stick it in the folder inside my messenger bag and stow it in the motorbike’s compartment, and the people in the caravan give me a friendly wave as they drive past.

Possibly left over from its brief time as a car, the motorbike has a built-in GPS, which I turn on so I can find my way out of the city, which is an unfamiliar one to me. I don’t ride it, though - I plan to walk with it until I’m close to the highway. As it turns out, though, the GPS is thoroughly confused and does not seem to be taking me any closer to where I want to go. The city seems to be a pretty nice place, old-fashioned with a lot of cobblestoned areas not accessible by car (although it does take me along a major road a couple times, and I get another sighting of the caravan). At one point, I pass a lit-up fountain in a tiny, irregularly shaped plaza. It’s about at that point that it becomes clear that the GPS still has no idea where I am and seems to have just been taking me in a big circle.

The city also has what strikes me as an unusually large number of people out and about at such an early hour. I have seen some of them enough times to suspect that they are probably lost too. I ask a nearby woman - she looks to be in her mid-20s, with pale skin and wearing a dull blue hooded jacket - where she is going. She says she is on her way to church. Oh, right - I guess that’s also a thing people sometimes do at ridiculously early hours of the morning. (She has an accent that I can’t place at first, but a little further into the dream, after my brain has had time to make the necessary connections, it occurs to me that it’s probably Finnish.) On further questioning, it turns out she’s got to go in the same direction I'm headed, and so are a couple others people nearby, so we decide to go together. I will use my phone GPS to take use there, as I’m sure it is more reliable than the other one.

It already seems to be going a lot better - the layout on the phone is actually matching up with the streets we’re walking along. At one point, we arrive at a major thoroughfare, and across the street is a large, baroque-looking building. I’m struck by how beautiful it is, the moonlight shining down on it from among the dramatically piled clouds. Do we go left or right from here? I check my phone. Oddly, it seems to be telling us to go straight through the building. But, now that I’m looking for it, I can see that there’s a narrow passageway that we can take. No crosswalk, but there’s barely anything on the road, so we just wait for a truck to pass and then cross.

Somehow, the passageway ends up taking us inside of the building. (The actual transition is rather vague, and so unfortunately I can’t say exactly how it went with taking the motorbike up that staircase….) This area is brightly lit, with white walls and largely white furnishings, and is vaguely familiar to me. People seem to be busy there setting things up in preparation for the next day. We end up stopping to talk to some people near a large table, where several of us sit down, and at some point a man approaches me, asking if I can help get my parents’ cat down from upstairs.

I agree, and he takes me to an adjoining room where there’s a kind of tunnel with a ladder in it leading up into a loft area. That’s where he is. I’m not looking forward to this. I have memories of this place, and that passage is a little narrower than my shoulders, which makes it uncomfortable to go up, but even worse coming down. I can only imagine what it’s like coming down it while trying to restrain a highly strung cat.

I climb the ladder partway, up to where I can see a little ways into the room, and call his name. Immediately, I see his pointy little Siamese face poking over the edge, looking down at me. Straightaway, he jumps down - the tunnel is sloped towards the top - and approaches me. He recognizes me. I was not expecting to get this lucky.

When he’s close enough, I grab him. He squirms, but I hold on tight, knowing it’s probably going to be a lot harder to catch him if he gets free and runs back up there, and bring him down to where the man has a carrier ready for him. I drop him down through the carrier’s open door, which he then closes. It’s done.

(As a note, the cat in this dream died a couple weeks ago - he was an old cat, and his kidneys were starting to fail - which gives an interesting dimension to all of this. You gotta wonder sometimes….)

17.5.25