Dream: Sakura in North Sydney

This is an extremely vivid dream, possibly the most vivid of 2017 so far.

I am driving in the Sydney harbour tunnel with M. It is clear this is where we are because the road and the signs are inherently familiar. It is very dark and we cannot see each other, but we can hear each other clearly.

He is describing how he was looking for which train station I usually get on the train. His description of a circular train network does not exist in Sydney – and I wonder if he is talking about Japan? He says that he could not recognise the characters for the stations it could have been because they were in kanji – so we must have been in Japan then. There were three names, but they are all lost.

His voice crackles as he describes how it was all lost. We are both sad for a moment, but soon we emerge into the daylight at the northern end of the tunnel. The sun is blindingly bright as we take the Falcon St exit to North Sydney. We pull up at North Sydney Boys high and park the car.

In the next scene, I’m riding a bicycle around the campus. The grass is an impossibly vivid green. I look down at the path I am following and marvel that my body follows the path so intuitively. I ride the bike onto a grassy part and feel the texture change. He is walking alongside me and we laugh at the days when I did not know how to ride a bike.

All around us is the scent of sakura. The time of year must be early spring, when Sydney is dotted with pink cherry blossoms. There are dozens of schoolboys bent over in the grass, picking up the petals of sakura flowers which have fallen. We ride gently over to them and see that they are putting the flower petals into big paper sacks.

What will they do with all the sakura?

Then I wake up.