On my mind

So, they told me, you need to go set up an account at THIS bank. They have one branch in town, it's over there.

And I sighed with annoyance. It was over in the farthest corner of town from me, somewhere I never went, that I assumed was just another residential-area. Why would anyone put a bank in an old housing development? Especially here, where it's a foregone assumption that people have cars and are willing to drive to go anywhere?

I also didn't WANT another account at a separate place, with all the probably-different login procedures and yet another complicated password to try to remember. But that's how life is, so I set off to try to find the bank branch and do what I needed to do.

As I said, this was a side of town totally unfamiliar to me, I had never been there before. So I was surprised to get there and see what looked like a small shopping district - why did no one mention the existence of this before? And there was a big, older building, like one of those old (1800s) hotels, the kind where the entire ground floor was either reception areas or shops. For some reason, I decided to go in...

And it turned out that it was something like a Christkindlmarkt, going on right then and right there (And there was a distinct German or at least Alpine feel to it: one of the stalls had an enormous taxidermied bear standing in "attack" position). There were stalls selling crafts, some selling food, some with antiques, even some with clothing. And it was all NICE stuff - not the usual kind of flea-markety poorly-made junk that seems to show up at itinerant-stall places. It was busy, but it was a busy-ness completely different from the wal-mart on a day when it is slammed - no one was rude, no one was pushing. There was a bit of a din, but it was a happy din.

I walked around for a bit, amazed - seriously, how did I live here fifteen years without ever finding out about this? and then thought, "But you have to find that bank branch, you have to take care of the account stuff. So I went back out to my car. And I realized, when I got there, I could not find where I wrote down the name and address of the bank branch - and this seemed like a stunningly complex little part of town, lots of side streets and stuff in unexpected alleys.

So I started to drive around slowly. Noted the parking for the Christkindlmarkt sort of place, with definite plans to come back as soon as I could. I wound up stopping in front of a store that sold nothing but skirts (yes, in fact, "skirts" was part of its name) and decided I had to look in a phone book for the address. Found the old phone book I keep in my car, then couldn't remember the name of the bank I was looking for....it started with A, I think. Or was it O? This was very unlike me, normally my memory is better, and also, I'd have had that slip of paper with the name and address in a pocket or at least in my purse...


and then I woke up.

Yeah. The whole Christkindlmarkt thing was just a dream. I'm both slightly sad and annoyed.

I used to regularly have dreams like that - of finding something WONDERFUL and unexpected somewhere (shortly before moving into my house they centered on things like finding a "secret room" in my house, or finding out that the backyard was much larger and more spectacular than I had thought, with things like waterfalls and small forests in it).  I don't know what it means psychologically. A desire for escape? A fed-up-ness with things the way they are and a longing for something "more"? I don't know.