"So please, please, please let me get what I want."

There was a time not too long ago when I dreamt obsessively of a run down industrial neighborhood. I can't remember when this dream first began, but I know that it continued for a good two years, between 2002 and 2004.

The dream usually started with me making a wrong turn down a street. The scene would quickly devolve into run down brick buildings, factories, and broken bottles. In other variations, I am trying to navigate an unfamiliar subway in an unfamiliar city, making a wrong stop in a wrong neighborhood. Sometimes I am drinking in the neighborhood bar. Never feeling threatened, I am a woman alone wandering the stark urban landscape of my unconscious.

I should remind you all that these dreams predated the first trip to the industrial neighborhood I now call home. Was this precognition? The similarities are too eerie. At the time, last summer in fact, I wondered if this was an omen. Tired of dreaming of the same place, I wondered if my subconscious or some higher power was trying to warn me of something. Was the bad neighborhood representative of the bad place I was in in reality? I'll admit to taking omens very seriously and this epiphany came at a time when I was trying to move to New York. I took the reoccurring dream as a confirmation that I needed to get there.

I haven't dreamt of the imaginary city for at least a year, not since I left Maryland, but last night I was there again wandering those desolate urban streets. I was there in the bar with the wooden floors. The last time I dreamt of this bar, I was so drunk that I passed out right there in the middle of the bar crowd, right there on the wooden floors. For this occasion I was sober and it was daytime. It was a coffee shop when it wasn't a bar. Holly was there and I was showing her my new dog, the one that I just gotten, the one who's leash was wrapped tightly around my hand. There was a second dog, but he ended up becoming a crumbling piece of chocolate cake with teal frosting. Dreams will do that you know, bend the rules and make dogs into cake.