I actually had two different dreams, both of travel, at different times and of different locations.
Overnight I dreamed that I was in Houston at some hotel, possibly for a science fiction convention of some sort. I had friends who were already there and were showing me around.
I’d been told that the top floor of the hotel was only for celebrities and so when they took me up in the elevator and showed me the view from up there, it never occurred to me that that was the top floor.
I enjoyed the view, and Alex (who was apparently with me) and I found an empty room and sat down for a minute, admiring how airy and spacious the room was. We walked down the hall and found a sort of banquet/conference room that was also very airy and had kind of golden-brown trim.
We bumped into a member of housekeeping who was shocked to see us there because we weren’t celebrities. You see, we were actually on the top floor.
So we went back downstairs and found our actual room, which it turned out we were sharing with two strangers. The celebrity rooms were airy and spacious. The rest of the rooms weren’t anything like that.
I kind of know where the celebrity rooms on the top floor came from. I’ve stayed in the Reliant/Medical Center/NRG Crowne Plaza Hotel, which used to be the AstroWorld Hotel, and which once had the most expensive hotel room in the . . . world? I think?
The room is still there, but no one stays in it any more. I considered seeing if I could use this blog as a way to get up there and see it, but I chickened out. I’m bound to go back to Houston some day. Maybe I’ll have more courage then.
I got up and had breakfast, but was still sleepy, so I went back and took a nap for another couple of hours. During this nap, I had the second dream, this one set in Philadelphia.
Now, I kind of know where this came from. I was a combination of President Biden having gone to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Amtrak, the cypress trees along Harwood Street outside of the Dallas Museum of Art, and my own disappointment that Alex decided not to go into the Boy Scouts*.
In this dream, I was somehow involved with a Boy Scout troop (though they were wearing blue Cub Scout uniforms) in Philadelphia that for some reason was having trouble finding somewhere to meet.
We went to the central library, which looked nothing like the real central library, of course, which was surrounded by trees, and I suggested that the troop could plant more trees around the building, staggered with the trees that were already there, and we could use that as our meeting place. I don’t know if we decided to do it or not.
For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, today’s book is The Authenticity Project, by Clare Pooley. Monica, who owns a coffee shop, finds a composition book left behind by an artist, Julian. In this book, which he left behind intentionally, Julian challenges the people who find it to write their truths in it and leave it for others to find. She does so, and the people who find it, then find each other, and honesty and drama, and maybe a few happy-ever-afters result. I think this was one of my BookBub purchases that I enjoyed most of all. I may even read it again at some point.
*I’ve always told him that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and that getting into some level of the upper echelons of the Boy Scouts would let him know a lot of people who could help him, even if he didn’t get all the way to Eagle Scout, even being a Life Scout would’ve been a help.**
** I would’ve loved to have been a Boy Scout. I certainly was unhappy with my Cadet Girl Scout troop’s desire to go to Six Flags with all of our money instead of having outings that were useful. Of course, if I’d’ve been (a) aware that the Girl Scout Gold Medal exists, and (b) able to see the future and known that the senior troop that my cadet troop fed into did the service projects and skill learning (I seem to recall that they learned how to sail at one point), I might’ve put up with cadets for another year so that I could get into that senior troop. But I digress.