2001 / december / 07
a dream of the deep south
I had a vivid (vivid as in technicolor) dream tonight.
I was visiting the
deep south of the US, Louisiana or thereabouts, with a friend who
grew up there.
Since nobody was flying anymore, her uncle picked us up from the
station, that remarkably was full of
SNCF electrical loco's
looking as dusty and worn as everything else, doing lots of
seemlingly useless shunting around.
Apart from the french loco's though, it was just like
the Proverbial South: a bit humid, the
green was a deep green, the cars were a bit like Havana's, older models
somehow still going. We sat in the back of the worn pickup, we stopped at
a store to pick up some groceries in a store and uncle had a chat with
the local coppa, having an 'old boys talk'.
And i felt very happy at the prospect of having to live
in this rural backwater where everything seemed
to be going much slower, from driving to talking, for the rest of my
life.
And then, while being in the dream,
i said to my friend: 'you know, the south is so different from how
i thought it would be. The image i had from movies and books was soooo
different!'. While, funnily enough, i was inside this dream, which
was precisely that image:
all my prejudices, positive, negative, romantic, stacked on top
of each other.
Most of the time when i dream, i somehow know that it is a dream.
sometimes it's reassuring (in the middle of a nightmare, somehow
knowing it is a dream). sometimes it's not. Or otherwise the dream
seems to be the real thing. But this kind of nesting i hadn't had
for a long time.
I woke up with a big grin, i finally understood where i'd been
all night. A bit sorry though that i wasn't going to live there
though...
