Entry 20

07 Sep 2019: Couldn’t remember the dream today.

08 Sep 2019, Sunday:

I was sitting on a park bench overlooking the river Neckar. . . This was on Philosophenweg, in Heidelberg. Sitting to my left at arm’s length on the other side of the bench was a young woman. . . She was giving me a smile, maybe a flirtatious one, maybe jocular, like as if there’s an inside joke we’re supposed to be sharing. I recognize her in the dream as someone familiar. . . like a friend, though yeah I was attracted to her even in the dream. I tried talking to her. She started explaining something to me. Something about her boyfriend. I didn’t understand it.

Then I was in some albergue. I was trying to figure out which bed to take as I look across the room. No bunk beds here though. I step outside the room for some reason, and outside I meet my dad. We talk, I think, though I don’t remember what about. . . I think I was trying to explain the network of albergues and how they work on the Camino. Then we’re back in the room. There’s a middle aged woman, I introduce her to my dad, but in that moment I couldn’t remember who the woman was, or how I knew her except that we were staying in the same albergue. Then after she’d walked away, I remembered she’s my neighbor in the town where I actually live in the outside “real” world, and I tell my dad how strange it was that we’d meet here on the Camino. Then my dad is gone but there’s another younger woman standing beside me as I figure out which bed to take. I see too that the beds have been re-arranged and I wonder if I should take the corner bed but see someone’s stuff on it and realize that bed is already taken. . . The younger woman introduced herself as the daughter of the older one, though I did not recognize her. I was interested in talking to her more, but she was no longer paying attention when I started to ask her something, she was already looking at her phone. And then I see she was on t.v., across the hall outside the room or by the window.

As I look across the hall I also see this guy lying down in bed, and I recognized him as P-, this Brazilian guy I’d walked with on the Camino Francés. But then when I come over across the hall to his room, he stood up and I saw he was actually not P-, just some bearded guy I didn’t know. He was then talking to his friend, another guy I also didn’t recognize. This other guy handed me and the P-doppelganger some hand-drawn maps and elevation profiles of the route we were taking the following day. They were hand- drawn on clips or scraps of paper– one fell and he picked it up and gave it to me. In the dream I wondered how reliable the maps and profiles were, but also how much time he must have spent copying and re-copying them. The other guy, his friend, thought it was amazing. I wasn’t sure if he was just being polite, and I didn’t think it was really that amazing, but I was grateful for what he was giving me. . .