I woke up with a weird mixture of notalgic glow and anxious icky feeling. The dream was about this old friggin' house -- a major restoration project -- which I had bought after selling the present restoration project. I knew in the dream that I had promised myself not to plunge into that morass again and that I had done so anyway.

But I also knew that the place was seriously funky cool, and in a good location -- just south of downtown in the Golden Triangle, around the corner from Pints Pub. It might have been the building where the Camera Obscura gallery is. The great period details from very early Craftsman times were covered under a couple layers of green paint. But it was only a couple layers!! How hard can it be to strip that off?? I couldn't believe I had done that to myself, yet I was pleased with the potential of the place. It's this eternal tension between the present reality and the imagined possibility that drives me into this quandary.

Smaller picture, the previous owner's stuff was mostly still there. I think I had bought it after that person had died. The fireplace mantle was covered with small stuff -- name tags, military ribbons & decorations, pens, etc. that had accumulated there over the decades of the owner's life. It was part open-air junk drawer and part shrine to the person's life. None of it was trash -- it was all important little mementos. A good part of the dream was looking over that stuff and wondering at the stories behind the individual pieces.