dreamstate

I didn’t sleep well Wednesday night, through a combination of drinking too much water right before bed and it being unseasonably warm all of a sudden. Probably because of these factors, I dreamed, vividly. My dreams here in Africa seem to me to be more often than not transparently symbolic of my anxieties and neuroses of waking life, and this one was no different. The following is the actual, honest-to-goodness, true dream, as well as I can remember it.
…….

The set-up: I was getting ready to go on a trip, with many other people. I was excited of course, and a little nervous, because we were going back to America. The trip was just going to be a visit, a week or so, not permanently leaving Senegal, so I wasn’t sweating it too much, but as we were advancing towards the security gate, I realized I didn’t know where my boarding pass was, or my driver’s license, or passport.

I started ransacking all of my bags looking for these critical papers, not coming up with anything even as the crowd thinned out and fewer and fewer people stayed nearby to help me search. My bags didn’t seem to be proper suitcases, just large plastic bags full of random stuff, but finally I turned up a scrap of paper on which I had scribbled in pen the flight information and my ticket numbers, and hoped that would suffice as a boarding pass. I continued to go through all of my things, which seemed like a ridiculous amount for only a weeklong trip, and as the minutes ticked by I became more and more certain that I was going to miss my flight. Somehow my mother was there too, my real American mother, and she offered to look through her baggage too in hopes of turning up something that could prove my identity. So we delved into her bags, together pulling out what must have been several kilos of large onions, until she had her hands around the biggest onion of all, which she pulled apart to reveal a few small books that she had tucked inside the cleverly-cut vegetable. I saw my monthly planner among her other closely guarded treasures, and reached for it, my hope rising. “I already looked in it,” she said to me. But I smiled, taking it from her and flipping the book open to its back flap, where the inside pocket divulged my coveted driver’s license, as well as the IDs of a few other PCVs, which I had apparently been holding onto for safe-keeping.

I sighed in relief, having feared my precious ID lost. But after a minute of calm, I looked around me, realizing everyone else was gone already. The hour continued to advance, and I still didn’t have my passport. My mother drifted out of the scene, and I drifted closer to waking, seeming once more to be alone, with no one left to help me search for the one last document I knew I needed to board the plane. I started to lose hope that I would be able to make this flight, and soon I woke, before I could find my passport, before I could go anywhere, my feet still on the ground here in Senegal.
…….

I’m not going to list the numerous links I can find here between my imaginative subconscious and its origins in reality (because they seem obvious to me, as I know myself so well) but I would be interested to know what you, dear readers, see, if you feel like commenting. Maybe the next time I will write about something actually related to the “work” I do here, Inch’Allah. Until then…