Dream log, 2 April 2003
Details unrecoverable, but it included a noder gathering where people stripped naked, or were about to. Though nothing truly interesting came of it.
Dream log, 3 April 2003
Details unrecoverable, but I have one clear impression of stopping off at a shop - an antiques shop, perhaps? - run by arcanamundi. I was cool towards her and tried to make my appearance there seem normal.
Dream log, 4 April 2003
I finally decided to go to France for the first time. I thought I'd do it quietly, just walk over one night, look around, get myself used to it. The first town I came to wasn't too bad, fairly familiar in appearance, with a slightly distinctive architecture. I went along a few streets. In one of them going down to the next one required passing through someone's glassed-in patio to get down the hill to the next level. I asked them for permission and they said sure, in English. Must have been an English expatriate.
I've left this dream log too late; the details are fading. I think I tried some shops, tried to note where the supermarket and so on were. This was all at night, in the wee hours. More of these connections within houses from one street to another. More English-speakers. To someone in one group I jokingly remarked that I hadn't heard a French-speaker at all yet.
They were noders. I was fairly sure this must be the noder gathering, and I tentatively approached the two people there. "E2?"
She smiled and they acknowledged me. We started chatting easily. She was very nice, young but motherly. He was a youth, whom she referred to as something like dari. I didn't catch her username, if she'd given it, and couldn't quite work out who he was: short for Darius, or was it a pet name for darl? A little later her husband also came in.
There must have been some introduction that I missed or mishead when more arrived. A young Indian woman - or perhaps half Indian, half Chinese, something of that kind - was the noder bantam, that at least I remember. She pointed out her father, or mother, her family weren't entirely sure which, who did indeed look curiously epicene like some ageing eunuch or boddhisattva. I didn't catch whether he was a noder too.
I asked someone the name of the town: Beauville or Bonville or something of that kind.
Later I was in the countryside on the edge of town. Very nice. A wood, an old quarry, but suddenly opening out into a glorious panorama of colour and trees and waters: it seemed more like something in the spaces of North America then what I would have expected in northern France, but after all I was new here. I luxuriated in the beauty of the scene.
Somehow my shoes had been reduced to virtually nothing, very badly worn and damaged; I decided I needed to go to a shop and find new ones. The shop scenes mentioned above might have been at this point. I was sitting on a rough rock ledge with a grassy covering. Then I saw, just below me, a pair of ankle-length green boots, rather tattered but clearly better than mine. Probably abandoned by a tramp. I thought in my present state they'd still do better than the leather rags that were left of my own. Then I noticed what I thought was an abandoned blanket under my legs, probably left by the same person. Looking longer I saw a person was still wrappen in, blanket or perhaps sleeping bag.
After walking round for a bit, I was sitting on the same ledge. Now I realized there were two sleeping bags, not one, if not more, with a couple in each: not tramps, but respectable-looking campers or some such. And I was sitting directly on top of one of them. I got up and asked whether I'd been sitting on them all the time. They said yes, looking at me in a mildly amused way as if they thought I should be embarrassed by it.