In my dream, I'm walking the streets of New York with a guy I used to know with whom I was never particularly close. We're not talking, and it's rather cold and grey, and the streets are empty except for us. Not empty in the manner of a last-man-on-Earth movie, not even empty in a dawn-on-Sunday-morning-on-Wall-Street way, but empty in the surreal manner of a movie musical shot on location, like that big number in the film version of Sweet Charity, where Shirley MacLaine in a drum major's outfit is dancing with a brass band in various empty locales in New York. The guy and I aren't dancing, we're just walking and not even talking, but in my head, in the dream, I'm imagining that I'm dancing along the same streets with a beautiful young woman and I'm singing the Bobby Darin arrangement of "I'm Beginning to See the Light." I continue to imagine that as we enter narrower, darker streets that start to fill up with guys in coveralls pushing carts and racks of food, like Convent Garden used to be in London, before it became a shopping center for tourists; the guy I'm with speaks to me for the first time to warn me away from stepping in some rotten food below a loading dock. Then the guy and I are suddenly in a crowded department store, on a floor that has been specifically redesigned for children—bright, colorful, scaled down—where crowds of kids are filing through in an energetic and orderly fashion, almost like well-drilled children in a musical. Suddenly the guy, who in real life has kids (I don't), warms up (he's been mostly silent and sullen to this point) and starts interacting with the children in a cheerful and affectionate way, helping them up stairs, answering questions, and so on. Out of a genuine and unmalicious curiosity, I ask him, "Do you miss your kids?" And he takes it the wrong way, giving me an angry, hurt look and saying, "Of course I miss my kids." Then I ask him, "Is Times Square near here?" and he points off to the right and says, very snidely, "But you don't want to go there." And I say, defensively, "But maybe I do," realizing at the same moment that we're actually nowhere near Times Square, which is blocks and blocks away, but very close to Union Square, where there's a Barnes and Noble. That's when I wake up.
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