Dreams

Word of the day:

soñar: to dream

This won´t be so much about Peru as about some overnight experiences and thoughts. I don´t know if anyone else has had this experience, but have you ever awoken from a dream and, though you don´t remember the details, found that your feelings and thoughts seem to have a sort of continuity with the dream itself? You can´t quite articulate why or how. All you know is that, immediately upon coming to consciousness, you find yourself feeling a certain way and thinking about certain things, feelings and thoughts that, for all the world, must have been there before you were even aware of them.

Last night I awoke at about 2am, and immediately I was thinking about friends. I was thinking about current friends, and past friends, many of whom I´ve let drift away. I felt sadness and longing and regret for the friends I´ve lost - too, too many - and gratitude and longing for the friends I have. Perhaps all of this came about because last night and today were the first times since I´ve been here that I´ve felt a great deal of frustration at not being able to communicate with most folks, at not being able to share jokes or stories, at not being able to sit down to watch a movie with someone or to share a passage in a book. It is, of course, a temporary condition, and part of the point of the trip, in a way. Many of you know, I´m sure, that I´m far too reserved and self-conscious for my own good, and this trip represents a sort of immersion, both in terms of language and in terms of compelling me to be more social if I´m to meet people at all. It´s an unusual strategy, I´ll admit, but on an intuitive level it makes some sense to me. I hope it doesn´t sound completely off.

This is a little personal, I suppose, but until this blog goes into wider readership it seems safe to post it. More about Peru and language lessons tomorrow, hopefully. And hopefully I´ll have some additional travel plans to share before the end of this week.

Be well, everyone.