“What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate — and immediately forget we have done so.”

I can’t remember if this was the first or second part of this dream, but I am with Paige in a house, I’m guessing my house, and I’m happy to see her. It is dark and gloomy, like a wintertime night, but the atmosphere is warm and almost relaxed.

I am in the middle of something, either a shower or sleeping, when Paige walks into my room and wakes me up. It startles me to hear a random voice in my house, but once I find out it is her, I smile and we walk together outside. The weather is cool, and the breeze feels wonderful against my skin. It is particularly soothing in addition to the bright but not overhwelming sun shining through the trees. It feels like morning, when the sun first arises and cuts through the fog and mist, bringing warmth into the neighborhood that we’re walking through. We sit down at a table in a park or a backyard. I sit across from her at the table, and she completes crafts while I sit and congratulate her on the projects and smile.

While I sit, I can’t shake the immense feeling of comfort and happiness that I have at this moment. I start thinking about the things my friends and I used to talk about, such as how a girl should make me feel, why I need a girlfriend because of the way I feel now, and so on. I continue to sit and watch her, and I become even more elated. I almost felt sick, like I wanted to leave, just because of the overwhelming scene that I was experiencing. Sunlight, cool, refreshing wind, the soothing outdoors, and this wonderful person that I had such a strong connection with sitting across from me. It isn’t sexual, she’s a child. It’s the purity of this exact point in time. Nothing can take away from this time spent outdoors, this beaming sun and this smile of an innocent child. The definition of happiness.

I am back in my house and at my bookshelf in the front hall. There may have been more events before this but I cannot remember. I start to look through things that I find on the shelf, but instead of them being the same old boring trinkets we usually save there, they are memorabilia from our family’s past. I pick up a large white envelope that has the faint gold ink markings of “DX-21” on the front. I think it is the manual for our synthesizer and begin to open it up. When I lift the flap at the top of the paper, a $100 bill is revealed. It is stuck to the sticky part of the envelope, and because of the person standing next to me, I let it go, turn it over, and wait to unstick it later. I move on to the pile next to the envelope. It turns out to be hundreds of picture prints. I start to scan through them. They are dusty and when I flick them I end up having to turn and cough. I see pictures of my mom and dad when they were younger. My dad had a mullet in some, and my mom was wearing dance clothes. I then see a bunch of pictures of Gabe and Sarah that were like a flipbook (or thing if you flick fast enough, it looks like a movie). When I flicked them, they were each kid in the same pose but growing older. I thought it was amazing that my parents actually got such similar photos together. I was thinking about how that was possible, and figured they just looked through photos to find ones that matched and kept them.

I almost remember transferrring from seeing Sarah’s baby picture with a funny face to her in real life somewhere, but I can’t remember.