Long ago when I was still living in San Francisco, I believe in the mid-1980s, I had this dream: I was moving through the southern parts of the city - some neighborhood I didn't know that well - when suddenly I realized I had travelled quite far and ended up in Armenia. I was approaching the top of a hill, and on the sun-drenched slope in front of and below me were houses scattered on both sides of the street. The atmosphere was calm but also a little eerie. At the time I had no idea why I would dream of Armenia: it was still a rather obscure Soviet Republic, and my mind's choice of destination seemed entirely random. Few other dreams have been as vivid or stayed with me nearly as long, but I also didn't dwell much on what this particular dream might have meant.
Yet those images from my long-ago sleep returned vividly to my mind when we first rounded the bend in the highway that brings the town into view. There are some minor differences between what I saw in my 1980s sleep and the reality of Noyemberyan, but the similarities are overwhelming. The whole dream was drenched in a sepia tone, and the sun was setting in front of me, whereas in reality the sun was merely moving toward evening on my left, and the light was a bit hard, with deep shadows and grey metal roofs.
I want to add one note: much as we wanted to come to Armenia once we had applied to the Peace Corps in spring 2009 and started to talk about where we'd want to end up, I never once thought of the dream, and our deliberations seemed far removed from any sentimental motives. Susan didn't know about this dream, and if anything she wanted to come here more than I did. It wasn't until half-way through training, when we found out where our site placement was back in early July, that my dream popped up again in my head. The long and short of it is that I can't make too much out of this, yet I am happy that by all appearances one small dream of mine seems to have come true.
No comments:
Post a Comment