Life is a Dream

I am sitting on our incredibly uncomfortable couch trying to piece together a strange dream I had.  I dreamt that I was back in the US for a week, that I saw friends & family, that I attended a dissertation defense at UVA, that I had Thanksgiving dinner at my mother's house.  But here I am, in the apartment on the Calle del Prado, and I'm not sure if any of this happened.  Like Segismundo of Golden-Age-Spanish-drama fame, I find myself wondering whether or not my memories are of a real experience or not.  Here are the pros and cons:

What was dreamlike about it

• I met with some good friends in the department lounge, where we had a lovely albeit too-short conversation.  I usually go out for lunch with these friends.  What in the world were we doing in the lounge?
• The dissertation defense was in the History department.  I am in Spanish, but do research that is historically oriented.  What was I doing there?   Clearly my intellectual identity issues were making themselves felt in my dreamworld.  The defense went extremely well, by the way.
• I was with some other good friends at a burger place, eating delicious organic burgers, but they were having veggie burgers and breadless burgers.  Breadless burgers??  Clearly Dali-esque.
• At Thanksgiving, my cousins Carlos Hernán an Victor Manuel were there.  Victor saw me putting marshmallows on the sweet potatoes, and expressed curiosity about this, asking me if it was an innovation of my own.  CH was there last year, so he checks out, but I have not seen VM since he was 11 or 14 years old.  And he continued to be fascinated with race cars, as he was when he was a kid.  A very suspicious detail.
• Carlos Hernán had a preternaturally well-groomed beard.
• At the Spanish Consulate, we explained to the consular official that my son had to have a note from them explaining why he was missing gym class that week.  The consular official provided us with said note, on consular stationery.
• I was in our house in Charlottesville, with the family, talking with our renters.  They had rearranged some of the furniture, so that the house looked both familiar and not so familiar.  At one point, I was looking for stuff I needed in boxes, and couldn't find anything.  Just like an anxiety dream.
• There was Asian food everywhere.  We went out for Thai with my mother, and for dim sum with my mother-in-law.  The strange mix of cultures in the DC area seemed unreal.
• My brother was at Thanksgiving in this psychedelic shirt.  He said an artist friend had made it, but it looked like it was made from old curtains, like in Gone with the Wind.  
• My niece asked me if they had killed Voldemort in the last Harry Potter book.  I asked her if she had read the book.  She simply responded, "yes."
• My son delighted in taking care of my in-law's dog Ruckus.  He referred to the dog as "my dog" and spoke of how she was going to come to live with us one day.  If you knew Ruckus, you would appreciate how creepy this is.

What was real-seeming about it

• During the dream, I could only fly if I was in an airplane.  I was on several of those.  None of them traveled over land, or dove into long tunnels, as they often do in my dreams.  None of them were detoured to Singapore or Swaziland, as often happens in my dreams.
• The food tasted so real.  The sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, turkey, pad thai, pork buns . . . all of it.  Good, too.
• I did not have to kill Voldemort, as I often do in my dreams, but I did see a movie in which several people were devoting themselves to this very objective.  
• VM did not look 11 anymore.  He looked like he was in his late 20s, as he should be.
• Charlie, my baby nephew, behaved in perfectly baby-like fashion.  He did not drive a car or do complicated stunts.  He gurgled a great deal, but did not talk, or tell me my new book was crap.
• Most of the people I encountered behaved quite reasonably, even affectionately.  No one spoke in tongues or demonstrated that they possessed magical abilities.  None of them notified me that I had to take, the very next day, a final exam in a class that I did not even know I was registered in.
• Heathrow Airport, where we connected on our return flight, was nowhere near as horrifying and stressful as it so often is in my dreams.  
• At the Spanish Consulate, there were no additional forms demanded of us.  We did not have to show that we had gotten our butts notarized and apostilled.  We handed them our passports, and they were returned to us with the visas in them 1.5 hours later.
• I have a large sack of Target-brand bathroom products and over-the-counter medications in my closet.  This sack was not there before the dream.  Nor were the Harry Potter books on the shelves, or Santiago's electric keyboard in the apartment before the dream.   There is also a selection of cheeses in the fridge, which we were apparently given by my mother-in-law, which were not there before.

At this point, I have seen no photographs of any of these experiences, and will not be swayed by photographs once I do see them.  How would I know they weren't concocted in Photoshop, perhaps on the basis of information garnered from this very blogpost?  The physical evidence (the bag of stuff, the cheese, the keyboard, etc) tells me I should believe this dream was no dream at all, but reality, but maybe Zoë's just been shopping a lot, and I've been too immersed in work to notice.  The visas and the note, though . . . Could Zoë and Santiago have gone to DC and gotten these?  I can only say, following Segismundo:

Yo sueño que estoy aquí

en este sofá sentado,

y soñé que a otro estado

más angloparlante fui.

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción,

y el mayor pavo es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.