Dream I'll Never Forget

When I was a kid, my mom and I used to live in an apartment building that was across the street from a parking lot that served a supermarket, a Laundromat and some other shops. When you looked out the windows of our living room and bedroom, you saw the parking lot and Laundromat. The parking lot had a guardrail around it, the kind you might see on a highway, and the Laundromat had a big blue awning that said, “Laundromat: Service and Self Services.” Along one of the Laundromat’s exterior walls, there were several dumpsters and a protruding, metal-grate storage shed. This storage shed was under lock and key to prevent people from accessing a staircase that led down to the Laundromat’s sub-ground level.

In a dream I’ll never forget, my aunt Iris and I walked down that staircase. When we got to the bottom of it we saw a door and entered through it. We were amazed at what we saw. It looked like we had entered some kind of private diner/club. There were a lot of people moving about in this space and the air was smoky. People were sitting on stools facing a long counter. The people were eating and smoking. People also sat at the booths that were adjacent to the counter. The milieu was such that it wouldn’t have been unusual to see someone who looked like Humphrey Bogart in the crowd. Iris and I just moved about the place, amazed at all the action. We were not seen.

For the longest time, I had thought that Iris and I had actually gone down that staircase. But my mom eventually convinced me that the entire thing was, or must have been, a dream.