Dream, July 14, 2012 Houston on foot

Dream, home, 6:20am

My travels take me to the Katy freeway that rounds Houston. I park near an off-ramp when I cannot get into the lane to switch directions. Take a bus to an old part of the city.

Decaying bars and strip joints built of plywood with an old west false front feel. My feet lose the sidewalk, and I discover I am walking in the left hand lane of the highway. A crowd of men in black jog toward me. I step back to the sidewalk and let them pass. They are uniformed police officers in helmets and carrying billy clubs as they run toward some event behind me. The sun sets.

A block to the Northwest, I walk into a neighborhood and pass a corner store with attached laundry. Fluorescent light pours through the dirty front windows, drawing squares of yellow on the street. I sense two young men behind me. Two dogs run around the corner before me, startling me as they pass. I carry a camera strapped around my neck. I put the view finder to my eye and pivot to take a shot of the dogs – handsome German Shepherds with tongues lolling as the trot through the heat of the evening. The young men are pleased that I would take a picture of their dogs. “You’re not afraid of them?” one asks. “Never had a problem with a dog – sometimes people…” They laugh as I walk on toward a two-level apartment complex that I visited a couple years ago in an earlier dream.  In that dream from the past, which I now recall, I was a neglected five-year-old moving from one apartment to another – ending in a pool party at my new complex. Tonight I pass it and remember the narrow layout of the first apartment and the tiki torch light on the faces of the other children at the party.

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