to sleep, perchance to dream

I have very vivid dreams here. I don't always remember them in the morning, but this morning my room phone rang at 6:45 AM. I was in the middle of a dream about some lawyer showing me an eccentric old lady's apartment in a very rundown building that had been an old hotel. It had red trim, and it was crumbling on the outside- inside, it hadn't been cared for for years. I was trying to pushpin something to the wall and it was crumbling plaster. It was a very large 1BR apartment, and I remember thinking that there'd be room for me to put an air mattress down for Lorin to stay over if he visited. The rent was something like $800 and the lawyer told me it was better for me to rent out my apartment and live in this one. Maybe he was an accountant. He had two different colored eyes, but it was sort of attractive in the way it is in a border collie. He took me to dinner and that's when I woke up. I thought, "I don't deserve to live in a crumbling old building."

Now, you may be wondering why my phone rang so early. This has been a regular thing, usually on Sundays. When I first got here, it rang at 7 AM three days in a row. No heavy breathing, but I got a sense of an actual person on the other end before I hung up. I asked them in the office about the phone calls and they said they'd talk to the college switchboard and see if there was a problem. But the other night Jenny from the office told me the whole place is haunted and it was not unusual to have crazy dreams here. There was an army hospital on this land at one time. Maybe someone is calling from the other side.

Back to the dream: it's pretty obvious that I'm starting to see myself as an eccentric old lady, and Lorin is in fact planning a trip to NY. Oh, and there was an old empty swimming pool in the apartment (I commented that it could be filled in and made into a dining room) and there was sort of a communal patio with a bunch of old people sitting around playing cards. So is this my future? Rundown, playing cards, no swimming, border collie? They say when you dream about a home, it's your own body you're dreaming about. It all doesn't surprise me, and the symbolism is right out of Freud. It didn't really weird me out. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I'm off for a hike in the mountains. I need to get out of here for a while.