Running thru the streets of my childhood neighborhood, along the way to my primary school (none of which I've seen in nearly 45 years) during a dark & wet, but not raining, morning. For some reason, I'm dragging with me a big rolling desk chair, the type with one support & 5 wheels. (You know how challenging those can be to steer for any distance)
The streets are empty and as big as they were to me as a child. The chair is also oversized to me. So, I must actually be a child.
I follow the exact route of the near mile I walked to school, for those 5 years of primary school. Moving at a breakneck pace, until I arrive there, I enter into the back basement entrance, where I attended elective band practice, in a tiny maintenance store room of the run-down public school, that had nowhere else to house its music room & teacher. (It was like studying music in a concrete prison cell, but I still think fondly of it.)
I am early, and the room is still locked. I awoke after standing alone, with my chair, staring up a moment, at the big industrial door, of the cinder block basement's corner.
Apparently, dreaming about a chair can symbolize a need for a rest, which tracks, considering how vigorously I'm running to get it there. Today is actually the 1st day of a 10 day vacation from work for me. How about that?
It's still amazing to me that I daily walked about 3/4 of a mile to school, as a 7-8 year old child, on dark, & wet winter mornings. It could take upwards of a half hour to hike, for my little legs, & was a commonality, in my youth, for me to be on the streets at that early hour by myself.
What a different time of self-reliance for a child. Much of my adult strength comes from that singular chore of independence. My dad would've already been at work at the plant & my mom didn't drive. Can you imagine a parent today having their kid walk 3/4 mile in the dark of winter, on their own, every day to school & back?
Can you imagine being a music teacher, seeing an 8 year old, standing outside that dank, gloomy room, waiting on you, as you arrive each morning, knowing that's how they came to be there? My lord, what she must've thought of me.
But for that odd, symbolic desk chair, that dream was essentially an excerpt from my childhood routine.