Dreams

I had another wacky dream this past week.  Nothing unusual there, but this one made me laugh out loud when I woke up.  Back story:  when I was in high school my whole family, one of my aunts, and my maternal grandparents all traveled to Europe.  It was wonderful trip getting to see so many amazing places.  Back to the present, I just finished reading a memoir of sorts:  an American author and professor, her professor husband and their 2 children move to Paris for a year.  I'm  a sucker for a travelogue/living abroad story, and  Eloisa James (Mary Bly) is a fantastic writer, both touching in her honesty in the passages about her mother's death as well as her own cancer story, and hysterically funny in the bits on her own family, parenting, and the faux pas that come from those cultural and linguistic nuances.  So I can only imagine that these two things, amid others I'm sure, were the roots for this dream.  Ok, so we are living in some city, New York sort of but not quite.  I am walking through this huge library which also operates as the subway station - side note: I think this is a lovely idea, forcing people to spend time in rooms full of books while waiting for their transportation.  As I'm wandering, I am thinking about the fact that my Aunt and I are flying to England later that day and I have neither packed, nor decided which, if any, children I am taking with me.  I am also unsure of whether or not I have a valid passport, but this detail is dismissed from my mind when I become side tracked by a shelf of books, historical romances (this is where I'm sure of the Eloisa James influence, as she writes this kind of fiction) and a woman with her newborn.  Babies will side track me every time, dream or reality.  I find a book that looks interesting and ponder the idea of somehow having another baby, even though it is biologically impossible now. Then I'm in my Aunt's apartment and we are trying once again to determine what to pack and when to leave.  It occurs to me at this point that we should have already gone to the airport because we think our flight leaves in an hour and being an international flight and all, well, security etc. we should have been there hours ago.  Oh well, I think, lets just go now.  Oh, and pack a few things. And decide if I'm taking children.  Then this woman, Beverly, Bev for short, whom I apparently know and rather well at that, chimes in "I'm taking my 3."  Children that is, and  it is completely fine that a) this woman is traveling with us, and b) she is bringing the children, and c) this would have some sway over my own decision to bring/not bring my own.  I woke up at this point feeling both a tremendous sense of relief that I didn't have any major packing to do for that day and that my children didn't need to fear that I would or would not choose to take them to the grocery store that day. Otherwise I was also disappointed in myself for being so woefully unprepared for my dream trip.   It made me think about those yucky thoughts I have about myself: that I'm a flake and typically fly by the seat of my unprepared pants.  No worries, I was quickly able to dismiss the thoughts, but I remained saddened that there is no international travel in my future.