[jammies]

I had this really strange dream just before I woke up today - not strange in the normal sense of dreams - where strange is what's normal - but in the sense that it was very lucid and realistic. Usually I don't remember dreams at all, other than nightmares, which I think is probably because I only remember when I'm scared to hell and wake up in the middle of one, and even then I don't really retain much more than fragments. So this was also strange in that I remember it all very well, for once.

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I dreamt that I was in this small room, with whitewashed walls and a stone floor. There was a dresser made of some reddish wood, a bed, and a small mirror on the dresser, oval, like you would use to comb your hair in front of, or fix your makeup with if you were a woman. I am getting dressed, and I'm wearing some kind of raggedy pants made of coarse, yellowish fiber, and am pulling on a brilliant white button-up shirt, very loose in the arms and cool to the touch.

There are sandals by the door, old ropy looking things made of rubber with hemp cords, and I push my feet into them - while doing so, I look down and I have very broad feet, dark and hairy. I decide to look into the mirror, and obviously it isn't me I see: I have black straight hair combed back from my forehead, and a wide square sallow face with dark, dark eyes. I look very vital, very strong, as if a labourer in the prime of his strength and hardened by exposure to harsh weather.

I turn from the mirror and open the door, which leads into a dim hall pierced by a long spill of intense sun from its near end. Far away I can hear pots banging together in a kitchen. I walk outside and am on a street, and there is dust everywhere like dry snow, and a sky overhead that looks like washed old bronze. Suddenly I realize I am really HERE, and it comes to me that it is 1958 and I am in northern Mexico, and if I want to I can stay here and never go back. I think about it for a minute, daydreaming about going north, to California, and I will know everything that is going to happen and there must be some great advantage in that. Then I wake up.
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Now I am the last person to put any faith into dreams, but all day long it's been difficult to stop thinking about this. I know there are people who claim to do "lucid dreaming", where they can control what happens in their dreams, but this was less control than it was being controlled, and so unbelievably convincing. Anyone else ever had a dream of this sort - one where you were actually regretting waking up and hoping you would dream again?