No Thoroughfare.

One night recently I dreamed I was walking with Walter Mitty, our cat, through an urban neighborhood, trying to reach our home, just a few blocks away. Like so many dreams, this one did not fit reality. To begin with, Spanish Fort, where I live, is a long way from being urban.

Moreover, I would never try to walk down a street with Mitty and, more to the point, he would never try to walk down a street with me. Mitty is totally an indoor cat, who never wanders up the hall from our apartment door further than to the next apartment, a distance of about 25 feet, and who has to be carried out of the building in a cage for his annual trip to the vet.

My dreams, typically, are about the struggle to accomplish something always just a bit out of reach. It was so in this urban neighborhood. No street was a thoroughfare. At every intersection I was faced with a choice of a half-block jog to the left or to the right, and I never knew which would being me closer to my destination.

To complicate my struggle, I was having to carry my weary cat. At 16 pounds, Mitty is no small burden, and he fights being held by anyone in an upright stance. (Laps are another thing.) So I struggled on and on in this dream, carrying my heavy, squirmy cat and getting nowhere. As is usual in such dreams, I woke before I reached my seemingly unreachable destination.

I wondered later if this was a dream about the publishing of my book, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough. It took me two years, working full time, to write this novel, and I’ve spent another year or more querying agents and publishers. More recently, I decided to self-publish, and that’s not a straight thoroughfare, either.

(To be continued.)