Last night I dreamed that my Mom and I were rushing around all over Iceland, trying to get something done which was never quite clear.
This was another one of those dreams in which we time-traveled. My Mom and I were both different ages in different parts of the dream, but our ages didn't match up with what year it was, and she also wasn't always 26 1/2 years older than I was like she was in real life. (Exactly 26 1/2 years older. My birthday is June 17 and Mom's is December 17. Our birthdays being half a year apart mattered very much to her. I never understood the excitement over that.)
I've never been to Iceland, and I couldn't tell you whether the place in my dream resembled any part of it. It looked like a small Midwestern town in the middle of winter in the 1960's.
It kept looking the same, although the time changed from the present to the early 20th century to anywhere in between.
At first we were in a car with Mom driving. We were going through the snowy small-town streets and we were lost. I got out and looked around on foot for a while. Then I saw that Mom was driving off. That really aggravated me. I felt she should have at least waited where she was until I got back to the car. Now not only were we lost, we had also lost contact with each other. And at this point in the dream it was around 1950, so neither of us had a cell phone.
However, I cleverly found her again. I don't know how I did that, but in any case, soon we were driving around inside a school building. The halls were wide, even the staircases were roomy enough that we could drive upstairs and down without any difficulty.
Then suddenly Mom was too tired to drive, so I suggested we stop outside of a cafeteria. It was an elementary school, but there were no children in sight, just a crowd of Icelandic adults and Mom and I. Mom lay down on a couch across the large room from food line where the people were gathered.
It became clear to me that 1) These people here were having some sort of a party; 2) that they didn't mind that we had crashed the party; and 3) that they could see we were having some sort of trouble, and wanted to help. They were very nice people.
I wanted to get Mom some sort of beverage. There were a variety of liquids in bottles and on tap, but I had no idea what sort of drinks they were. I could make no sense of the Icelandic names of these products. Alcohol was strictly out of the question: Mom had perhaps a total of a half-dozen alcoholic drinks over the course of the first half of her life, and none at all after that. Also, as time passed, she became more and more fanatically opposed to the idea of anyone ever having any sort of alcoholic drink for any reason, perhaps the single most drastic exception to her generally tolerant and understanding nature.
Also, Mom never liked any carbonated beverages. No fizzy soda pop for her.
These Icelanders, although very friendly, had none of them a strong command of English, and my Icelandic was much worse still, and we spent quite a while gesturing at various beverages and failing to understand one another.
Then suddenly Mom was feeling just fine again and we were in two different places, simultaneously: inside a house in Iceland, and bicycling about a mile away. My brother was also with us on a bicycle.
We belonged in the house, we hadn't just bum-rushed our way in. Either we were renting it, or we had been invited in.
Both inside the house and out there on the bicycles, we were still working on that unspecified problem which had been occupying us for the entire dream. Mom was on a 1960's style telephone,
talking to someone about it. Simultaneously, she and I and my brother were out there bicycling through the icy streets, looking for a solution. Mom seemed optimistic about getting the whole thing sorted out here and now. I could see no reason for her optimism. While she spoke on the phone, I looked out the living room window, waiting to see the three of us approaching on our bicycles. I had just caught a glimpse of us about a quarter-mile away when I woke up.
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