Roseburg

This is an interesting dream because I have been to this dream location before, and experienced many of the same feelings. I am in a city, I am in the older part of the city, in a place where the main road makes a T down the original main street of this town. Next to the intersection is an open field surrounded by kitschy tourist shops and a couple of mom and pop restaurants where the price of coffee hasn't changed since 1971. The old waitresses hangout outside the places in their starched aprons and "Flo" hats, smoking cigarettes and chatting about the past, how wonderful it was, how the times have changed. The times have changed, the city has moved on, sometime in the late 90's all of the business moved further down the freeway into a new part of the city, leaving these people and their memories relics of a past not quite too old to remember. I am there on a college trip, we are doing anthropologic studies. My husband is with me. I go and interview the people at the restaurant right at the T shaped crossroads. There are Splintering Wagon Wheels framing the ponderosa style deck, the restaurant hasn't seen a face lift since 1986. If you look down the old main street you can see a row of shops, grand windows now empty, now webby and dusty, some cracked some boarded. The local I am interviewing sighs * "It wasn't always like this, this was the place to be until about 1998, and then everything moved further down to the city. This place was a paradise, an escape in the summer for the high school kids, back in the 70's they would fill up the park and the bandstand, laying out in their bathing suits and spending their money at the shops. At Christmas the shop windows were filled with gifts and Christmas displays, people would line up and walk around the block just to see them all"- my interviewee look sad, reminiscing about a past that will never come back. He shows me a picture in a very 80's frame hanging on his restaurant wall, it is a picture of Christmas Eve, a huge "Macys day - esque" parade is going down the street, there are announcers on a float. People are crowding into the streets, bundled up in moon boots and hats with fuzzy balls adoring the tops. It is all so real, I remember people looking like this when I was a kid, the details are amazing, the children are in snowsuits with alligator clips on their mittens, there are balloons being handed out but they only float half high because of the cold. Then the picture comes alive like one of those pictures in Harry Potter, He is narrating the whole time - "Important people came to see the festivities, everyone was here- even Hollywood Stars watched them. I see Woody Allen step into the street holding his daughters hand (I realize in my conscience mind that he will marry her someday, and I think about how gross that is) I see his wife looking annoyed and rushed as they cross the street. The picture stops moving. I realize at this point that even though I am watching all of this, i ma actually pulling most of my information about this place and it's past from some sort of memory, being either my own or a collective one I have tapped into. I feel a sadness of the place that lost it's greatness, for the memories that were trapped there like a ghostly echo bouncing off of empty glass windows, moving though deserted diners and dying in the whispery grass where loud amazing summers had boomed through the field. I had a final thought : "I just experienced something amazing, I think I saw through someone else's memory." Then I slipped seamlessly back into the story line and had another dream about a friend falling in love with me, we lived in a crazy apartment complex where natural disaster had flooded it and broken it apart. I had a courtyard with a fountain that lit up. He told me he was in love, I said No, I am married, he took me on a bus and started driving like a maniac- I told him to let me off and he did. I felt bad because his sister was still on the bus with him. I went and told my husband about it. The dream ended and began a new one where I the details are so fuzzy now I can't piece them together.