Lately, I’ve been trying to write down the previous night’s dreams when I wake up in the morning. I’ve discovered my dreams are fascinating narratives filled with hard-core midget sex, men with shaving cream bottles for noses, and giant, flying bat-winged vaginas. Much like everyone else’s dreams, I suppose.

I have noticed one interesting thing lately. I often have a dream where I’m in some location and I have to walk in a certain direction to get to a busier location. I’m also aware that if I go beyond that location, I’ll enter into a questionable, somewhat scary area. The details of the whole locale are always different, though it’s usually something like a city. Sometimes I’m aware that one of these areas is near a Chinatown. I also have a sense that the area to the left me is a great nothingness. Traveling that direction is not an option.

Now this recurring thing, this location, has appeared in many of my dreams, going back years. And whenever I would be there, I would have some nagging sense of familiarity. It’s been only in the past week that I realized what this place is; it’s the neighborhood I grew up in Honolulu. On weekends, I would often walk westward from my house near Waikiki along one of the main drags, ultimately ending up in the busy downtown area. (It’s about an hour walk; sometimes I would take the bus.) And, if I went a little past downtown, I’d hit the Chinatown area which is a little sketchy. (It’s the only place in Hawaii I ever recall seeing a hooker.) Beyond that is an even more questionable area whose name I don’t recall but was usually filled with Asian and Hawaiian alcoholics playing board games. And, on those trips, to my left was a great nothingness — the Pacific Ocean.

Now this kind of ties in with my previous post about what I called “dream logic” (though, in hindsight, I was really talking more about dream knowledge.) I was talking about how you kind of have roles in dreams — like you see some guy who looks nothing like your best friend Fred (maybe he’s even a giant bat winged vagina) but you implicitly know this is your best friend Fred. In a way, this location is playing a role. Sometimes it’s played by a busy industrial area, sometimes something that looks more like old Europe, but it’s fundamentally the same place. The same way that Fred is always Fred, no matter what he looks like.

It’s wild, wacky stuff.