It was a weird dream, the dream I had last night; it was one of those dreams that sprawl, expand around all of your available brainspace and then some. The “plot,” such as dreams have plots, was that I was in some kind of… convention, I guess, or event, with lots of people I work with and know through the Internet, and at this convention and event, two people I know/have worked with, are rumored to have died. A strange thing, I know; it wasn’t that they were dead, but that they may have died but no-one was sure. In the middle of this, there was some kind of power cut or something, so we couldn’t use our phones to check on anyone, and had instead – for some reason I can’t remember, if there was a reason – to wait through the night and get an answer in the morning.
In the middle of this, The Soloists appeared; they were a roving, rambling band of performers who went to people’s house and apartments, followed by an eager, excited audience, to perform spoken word readings (or improvisations? I can’t remember). There was an excited throng that swept us all up, an electric feeling that people wanted to share, while I was concerned and worried and asking someone whether or not she believed the rumor that her girlfriend had killed herself.
It wasn’t a depressing dream, as such, but certainly an anxious one. What remains most clear in my memory, though, was the city we were all in. A nighttime, rainy place with the orange streetlights of the U.K., it was a city that doesn’t exist, but an amalgam of London, Amsterdam, Aberdeen (where I went to college) and New York. Somewhere that could have been friendly, in another time.
