Remember this, our favorite town.

I’ve mentioned before, how I don’t so much remember my dreams as such; what I do remember is usually dredged from the not-quite-dreams you have when you’ve popped awake at two in the morning out of some atavistic polyphasic rhythm, and you’ve micturated and drunk some water and maybe checked on the dogs and climbed back within the (at this time of year) still deliciously body-warmed bedclothes, and you’re lying there thinking idle thoughts as you wait for a sleep which never seems to come until it’s three thirty or four in the morning and you realize you’ve been asleep, that those idle musings had some time ago slipped over some inscrutable limen to become not-quite-thoughts, and now they’re slipping away like sand, and so anyway, this morning—but I should back up a moment. I don’t so much remember my dreams, not as such, but of what I have brought back, over the years, my dreams set in an urban environment are all, pretty much, set in the same urban environment, a city I’ve never been to, a city that doesn’t exist out here, and I think some of this might be the fact that I’ve been living in the same city for thirty some-odd years after twenty some-odd years of peripatetic restlessness (by the time I was 18, I’d lived in 20 different houses)—it’s a pleasant city, to be sure, walkable, with a good public transit system, the lines and maps of which have helped me fix the shape of it in my head, there’s a river, runs west to east, and most of the downtown is in the north bank, and there’s a complicated freeway interchange along the river, it’s all rather a bit like Portland turned on its side, but there’s also an almost-island on the east end that has a university and an arts district and also some lovely public gardens, I’m not sure where I got that, but anyway, this morning, lying there waiting for the sleep that had already bagged me, I found myself looking over a map in a book, the sort of map that’s the frontispiece or tucked in the end-papers of those sorts of books, and I said, “You know how I have the same city I go to when I’m dreaming?” or words to that effect, and the kid who was with me but pretending to be my brother (which is odd, the kid’s a much better fit for my littler sister), the kid says, “I always think it’s weird that you have that,” pretty much verbatim, but I’m pointing to the map, and I say something like, “I think it’s based on all the time I’ve spent looking at this, the city of O———, in Zimamvia!” and reader, I’m not being coy, I really did say something that began with the letter O, but was otherwise entirely illegible in the moment, not forgotten later, and anyway the map we were looking at in a book that I’m fairly certain was not by Eddison was very clearly much not a map of Zimiamvia, I’m pretty sure it was a pretty prosaic map of the Black Sea, and the city of O——— I was pointing to was up by the Sea of Azov. —Oh, and the old saw about how you can’t read in dreams? Or more specifically, you can dream that you have read, but the actual letterforms-to-concept process of reading is impossible in a dream state? I mean, I can? In small bursts. Maybe dream researchers need to talk to more typesetters and printer’s devils.