Directions to the City

Over the years it has fascinated me how we can have dreams that are recurrent in theme and circumstance. I had one of those dreams two nights ago. I was walking, as I have before, towards a  metropolis in view. Large skyscrapers loom up in the shadow of the evening falling. In the dream the metropolis is Austin, but the skyline looks more like Chicago, which was the first large American city I visited when I was 16. I am walking alone in the dream, lost, looking for directions, as people mill about me,and ignore me, and I am looking for a friendly person who can help me get home. I am not very successful, until I find an elderly woman who takes the time to steer me in the direction I want to go. The place I call home in the dream is the place I grew up in , in Roeselare, Belgium. I finally get to my house, and oddly enough, it is right next to the edge of the big city. I never became comfortable driving on freeways, and it is interesting how having to deal with city traffic is a recurring theme, as I get lost time and again, and cannot find any help, adding to the general anxiety of the dream. In another part of the dream, before I meet up with the kind elderly woman, a huge white dragon flies over the city, and seemingly no one notices it but me. The dragon is scary looking, breathing fire, and looks me straight in the eye, but I am not afraid, and s(h)e hovers there, her huge wings swooshing over the skyline. When I woke up, I was amazed that I had revisited a dream I have had over a number of years, and that this time a dragon appeared who seemed to have sympathy for my plight of city alienation. I smiled at my predicament, a fish out of water, so to speak. The alienation seems a theme, that I deal with as best as I can, but never as dramatically as in my dreams. The stressful part of the dream is that I am always walking everywhere, and I seem to be going around in circles, over and over again, trying to get home, where my husband and son are, except home is simultaneously in Belgium and Washington State. I try very hard to get where I need to go, to find my way, never seeming discouraged at failing, time and again, as whatever directions I am following or trying to understand frustrate me, and get me nowhere. I am certainly not easily discouraged, in daily life, or my dream life. Directions to the city. Directions to life. Ones for a dream state, the others for waking life,the search for them blending together in a tireless effort to make sense of my journey in this world.