contemplativeHills. Roads. Paths. Foliage. Ocean. They were in my dream last night. So was a map. The map showed a road, an east-west road, that should exist there ("there" being what felt to be a very specific location in my dream) but was only partly there. I scrambled over a high, long berm to get to the road, to find it between that berm on its south side and another berm -- very high, very plant-covered -- on its north side, as this road extended into a tunnel that wasn't on the map. I decided not to enter the tunnel. I never did enter. Going instead back and forth between the berm-hidden road and the land on the other side -- that land being rolling, desert-dusty hillsides extending south to an unbroken horizon under a flat-lit sky -- I'd see that land either bisected by a long, long multicolored path towards that horizon or not bisected by any path. True: it kept appearing and disappearing. That path/not path trended downhill and southwest: past a huge house standing alone where a party was happening on its large decks, past a huge tree, and past Patrick Stewart (really) proclaiming towards the people in the house overlooking this all.
I kept climbing over that berm to be at the road again, seeing it disappear into the tunnel. The map showed an ocean past the northern berm, which I only climbed over to once; and the ocean was there, as promised. So was another road, parallel to the berm-hidden one, with signs it had been traveled.
I sometimes feel a strong sense of direction in my dreams, as I did last night. (I really taught myself my sense of direction: that sense of mine was so bad as a child that if I visited Portland, where my grandparents lived at the time, I'd literally think east was west and north was south. Don't ask me why. Later, in my teens, I became interested in maps, and studied them to see how places on the map related to each other. I built up that ability. It serves me well now.) The directions, the sense of place, felt important. It felt like a previuosly unexplored corner of a dream environment I have imagined before.
It was beautiful, too, in its stark, alone-but-not-lonely way.
And that was some of what my mind concocted last night.