Dream Memory
In the dream, I've returned to a place. The place is recognizable, a location from real-life memory. (Or so I believe in the dream).
I know what I expect to find there. It's near the sea, there's a kind of plaza or promenade. It's not beautiful. Concrete, squarish buildings -- dilapidated, out of date and provincial. There are places to eat, but they're nothing special: a couple of shops where you can enjoy a sandwich. The last time I was here (in real life), I was bored and disappointed. Yet now (in the dream) I'm feeling nostalgia, simply because this is somewhere I've been before and I remember exactly where to find what I'm looking for, even though several years have passed.
However, it turns out I can't locate the promenade. The buildings are gone, along with the bland shops. It appears that the place, which I think is in Greece, has been developed. Everything subpar, backwards or quotidian has been removed; instead, there is a clean, sunny beach and a pristine sea. People are playing happily in the sand, on the rocks, and in the water. I can see it's a big improvement. And yet I can't help feeling annoyed, because it's not the way I remember it.
At that moment, my 'rents show up, wanting to be taken somewhere for lunch, and I have to explain to them that the place I'd had in mind is gone and I don't know where anything is any more.
Soon after, the dream ends and I wake up. What's been puzzling me all morning is that I cannot figure out what the real-life memory was that the dream was supposedly referencing.
Throughout the dream, I was conscious of experiencing an imaginary return to a real-life past situation. The dream was partly lucid; that is, I was aware of it being a dream. I even guided myself through it, giving navigational instructions based on what my conscious, wakeful mind remembered of the place.
Its existence was a basic assumption underlying the dream and the catalyst for its primary emotion: nostalgia. But I can't identify the place. It seems to be a composite of various geographically and temporally distinct memories, but I can't even parse the specific elements. The entire dream, I now realize, took place within a self-contained, fictitious environment.
The sense of reality in the dream, as best as I can figure it, was a byproduct of the sense of elapsed time. In other words, the fact that there was a present-past relationship convinced me that it was "real." I think this is what made the dream unusual -- many dreams occur in a kind of ongoing present, phenomena succeeding each other without too much backstory.
This dream came with its own memory-kit, as though following some previous installment which may never have been actually dreamed.
11:01:10 AM 
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