This has been the strangest of winters. Perhaps that accounts for the dreams. I don't remember the details of these dreams, but I wake with vague images of rushing streams, long roads, and on hills above them, twisting city streets lined by dense buildings draped with oriels, like San Francisco displaced to the mountains and bent into odd shapes. One vivid dream image remains: I am at a party in a big Victorian house, and a boy of five or six is vomiting into a toilet as I hold him above it. My older brother, not as he is now, but as he was when he was at nineteen or twenty, walks by the open door of the bathroom and chuckles when he sees me. When the boy is done vomiting, I go to flush the toilet and see that it is full of small flowers. I have no idea what any of these odd dream images mean, if they mean anything at all.
I still have the feeling that something in my subconscious is trying to make its way to the surface. Whatever it is continues to elude me. Sometimes I find one of the cats staring at me, and realize that I have been woolgathering and that my mind is entirely blank; I have no wool. I wonder what the cats know that I don't?
