This is turning into an unusually foggy month. No complaints from me, of course. Fog is one of my favorite weather conditions. Before going to sleep this morning, I stepped out for a last look, and saw that a porch light which had been turned on a few doors up the street was barely visible, and the pines even closer in the other direction were swathed in misty obscurity, mere outlines of trees against the growing paleness of sky. Yet, looking up, I could see several stars quite clearly. The fog must have been hugging the ground in a layer no more than a hundred feet thick. I imagined that, from an airplane, it would have appeared as no more than a slight blurring of the landscape, though the horizontal view was like looking through layers of gauze. I don't recall ever having seen a fog so thick on the ground yet so shallow. Had there been time, I'd have liked to go down into one of the nearby arroyos where the winter streams now run noisily. Fogs are always at their most dense there, and a few steps from the road will take you to a world of only gray light, gurgling water, and the ghosts of trees and brush. Once I was in such a place, and saw a young stag appear out of the gloom a few yards away. He gazed at me briefly, then jumped the narrow stream and vanished in the mists of the further bank.
But today I needed to sleep, and I dreamed of being in a place full of old buildings, mid to late nineteenth century wooden houses and large commercial blocks and apartments and factories made of brick and stone, separated by open fields, as though a town had gone through repeated periods of expectant growth, none of which had brought a great population, and so the place was like a half-abandoned city scattered through groves and farms and woodlands which were themselves disused and returning to the wild. Wisps of fog drifted through the dream, as well, but some of those may have been ghosts. The interesting thing is that this was a new dreamscape. Most of the dreams I've remembered for the last few years (though I remember very few) have been variations on earlier dreams, set in familiar dreamscapes. To encounter something new (however decayed the place may have been) was a surprise to me. Perhaps I'll get to explore this new place more thoroughly in some future dream.
Later: I spoke too soon about the improvement in Sluggo's behavior. Just as I attempted to post this entry, he showed me his blue screen, restarted himself, and ran Scan Disk with it's condescending "Always choose 'Shut Down' from the Start Menu" message. Well, I would, if I were given the chance! Given an even better chance, I'd be using a computer of less cranky disposition, preferably running an OS other than Windows. Humph!