Someone is frantically brushing ants off of a brick wall with a broom, in the alcove of a dark old house, and I’m watching as he does this. I’m thinking that he seems a little misguided, since the ants are just going to come back. He has black hair, and he’s built a bit like me, so I wonder if he’s my younger self.
When he turns to see me, I realize that he is my younger self, though he really doesn’t look anything like me.
With a sense of the urgency of the situation, I feel I must impart some wisdom. “There will be time to focus,” I tell him, trying to express what feels like a lifetime of ideas using a small number of very simple words. He seems extremely relieved to hear this, and eager for more, and I feel a bit of a fatherly pressure not to mess this up.
“Keep extracting that… little bit of nectar from the… tiny hard pebble that is life,” I hazard, using both my hands in the effort to get my point across.
…
I dreamed this sometime in September of 2017, when I drafted this post, but for some reason it sat around unpublished until today, when I stumbled upon it and hit the Publish button. It seems like something I might have dreamed last night, what with this crazy coronaviral age we’re in.