I am giving a tour to a fairly rich couple who have bought a house, roughly in Powelton Village, on which I probably did some renovations. He is older than me, his name is Sam, friendly, unassuming but somewhat ungainly. We are close to being friends. She is young, fairly sexy, dark to black hair, wearing a short, bright yellow caftan-type dress. I show them around the neighborhood, formerly a tumbledown mess that has been or is still being renovated.
I show them a lovely lot where a house used to stand. We go through their house, which is not yet in good condition, with peeling paint and/or paper. Sam and I look out the window at a house close by and I admire the frosted, figured glass of its bay window. I think somehow that my couple’s house is not one of the more interesting ones in the neighborhood.
We go for a walk or tour somehow down by the Delaware River. In the old streets, construction is underway everywhere, cutting through and under the streets and buttresses of bridges and old roadways or railways on multiple levels. The sidewalks and streets are incredibly crowded with workers, shoppers, and walkers. Sam occasionally wanders off and finally I can’t find him, but the woman seems unconcerned.
She also wanders off and I have difficulty tracking her down, but find her high in the air, lying on a mattress or thick cloth enclosed in a clamshell-like bucket of a piece of what I take to be construction machinery. It has something to do with a pleasure or massage treatment with oil. I don’t understand it at all. (This may be a misplaced element in the dream.)
I’m late to going home to my wife but don’t know how to get there by public transportation, and I realize that I am dirty from wandering through the construction areas. I’m also not wearing a shirt and am probably in shorts, embarrassed to think of getting on an elevated line or a bus. My wife seems a distant consideration. I’m very attracted to the woman from the couple and think we may end up having an affair. At one point she leans back against me while we wait to find Sam but there’s nothing intense. My desire for her is muted, perhaps not desire for a woman as such.
We get temporarily lost trying to find their house but it doesn’t make much difference. We pass and go around piles of bricks and dirt under archways, through busy storerooms, past friendly construction workers. I mention to her that these changes they have made, the mishmash of old and new, is exciting and vital. She agrees. Earlier, I had taken her through a renovated courtyard complex that had once been a slum but was now lined with flower-edged brick walkways. She had largely ignored it. She is much more interested in this old-new mix, the chaotic.
She continually radiates a privileged lack of concern that is not in any way haughty. Instead, she seems a liberated soul with intense involvement and curiosity. At one point I tell her how the whole district used to be deserted in the evenings when I was a child, that it was all businesses that closed at 5 pm.
At some point her dress changed from the bright yellow one to an even shorter reddish-tan, earth-color one. From the back I see that it only reaches half way down her ass and wonder why/how she can walk around like that, though no one pays much attention. She doesn’t have especially good legs.
It’s getting late, we have not seen Sam for some time, and I ask her if she is going to stay over at their house (they seem to be on a visit, not yet moving in). I consider asking her if they would like to stay over at our place, but I realize that I shouldn’t bring home to my wife a woman I want to have an affair with. There is no answer or resolution to this and I wake up.
The dream was pleasant, friendly, but I wake deeply depressed, on the verge of tears. The woman and the chaos of the city under construction may represent something I’ve lost; maybe something (my writing?) that I lost once, found and am afraid of losing again. The woman with dark hair and only a shirt/short dress, me with light hair and only trousers or shorts, may be two halves of one person. Yellow is also a color I usually see with my eyes closed or in dreams, under psychedelics or intense emotion, though I felt nothing intense while in the dream. The intensity lay in the world outside “me,” in the city, the woman. I think I never heard her name.
lickhaven 