So, this morning ends in triumph: I walked down to the barn to make a valiant last try at starting the Rambler, expecting to find the battery dead from the exertions of yesterday. I did not touch the gas pedal, having convinced myself I had flooded her yesterday with what a remembered was the customary two pumps to get things primed.

She fired right up. Triumph! On to Indiana!

It was a good weekend at the Farm with some productive moments yesterday, foiled only by the failure to get Rosie-the-Rambler started. The Truck and the tractor both fired up like champs after their winter slumbers.

Last night I cooked a nice dinner, read a book and semi-dozed through the political shows until I yawned big. I gave up and crashed into dreamless sleep until the usual waking period between three and four. I read for a while and then drifted off again. The current dream de jour started out with me cleaning out a desk in the Pentagon. What ensued was the same progressive surreal series of events as the one I had the night before, a bewildering wander through shifting but familiar places.

I was talking to a lady friend on the mobile phone, not about anything in particular, and the connection dropped, which led me to take the battery out of the phone to check it (in dream logic!) and I dropped it. In the attempt to unscramble all the things that I was bagging, presumably to leave, it occurred to me I had to go get something. Coffee from the Ethiopian ladies in Corridor 3? That began a wild odyssey across the building. Trying to navigate corridors I once knew and now were oddly plastic and strange. Morphing, losing things from my hands at each stop.

I had multiple phones…like normal, but they included the land line handset and the miniature camera i used to carry. I wanted to call my friend back, but the battery to the phone was part of the office litter in my bag, and what I really had to do was get back to the office. I stopped to get my bearings at one of the rings off the main axial corridor and set up camp. I left some stuff there, intending to come back, though I knew it would be gone when I did, and sure enough, it was.

I was at the Secretary’s entrance, the ceremonial side, for a bizarre interlude as part of a group photograph of people I did not know. The great still life in the floor was impressive, and all I needed to do was get across Ground Zero- the park like grassy area in the Middle of the vast building- and got on a bus to ride over, which it did, but as I got up to exit, the vehicle took off at incredible speed. There was, I noted with some concern, no driver.

Then there was an ominous sound that was familiar…the weather alert chime from the iPad on the bed next to me, and I was awake again.

OK, I get what the dream meant, but the technical details were so vivid that I picked up the iPad and wrote down what I could remember before it faded. The detail was extraordinary: the workers and the tarps closing off their secretive meeting, and that wild woman in the yellow dress hurtling up the staircase on the down side, nearly causing me to stumble down the stairs…so vivid, so real.

The Farm is good for dreaming, I guess. The meanings are all perfectly transparent. It is about apprehension and anxiety about all the things, national and personal, and I am sure resolution is going to be rapid. But it is pretty clear that for the short term, I am going to wind up at the farm by late summer.

I guess the question is sort of quo vadis- where from there? I am hoping the dreams take a different direction!

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
http://www.vicsocotra.com