The dream began with many people I knew walking to a lecture or a debate. I was young, maybe in college, as were the other people walking with me. A covered stage on the north end, where someone was speaking, then a woman on the opposite end of the venue, a woman I know in real life but still cannot place, stood up and said something shockingly disagreeable. I stood up and raised my right fist, clearly a sign I did not support her, as did many others. Then we left.

            On the way back, the mood turned more jovial, and I knew our route in real life. It’s a city street in Valdosta where I used to run, as there is little traffic. We came upon a device on a pedestal. Pushing the button would display the distance from the device to the road’s edge, which was 1.4 feet. Neither the device nor the road ever moved, so we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all but still pushed the button many times.

            Then, I was entirely in a different location, one I had never been to before or in a dream. A woman I knew only while asleep and I argued. She was leaving me but didn’t want to be the one who said it. In the end, she stormed out but didn’t take her stuff. This part of the dream lasted only a short while.

            The next part of the dream was more lucid. The set was a reoccurring dreamscape of an apartment building made of deep reddish-brown brick. The apartments are small. The building has four stories, and even though it’s rather cramped, the place is nice and clean, and the flats are well-kept.

            I had the key to a woman’s apartment, someone known in real life, and we were meeting soon. Yet a came upon a stack of doors on the sidewalk, stopped to look, and another woman put her coffee cup on top of the pile.

            “Do you come to these doors often?” I asked, and she laughed.

            Then I went up the stairs to my destination and stopped to think about my last time here. I remembered with great clarity the windows, the style of the rooms, the view over the town, and the smells of the building. I felt it fading away. Thunder awoke me. The sound of hard rain was the dominant sense.