E20: Dream Cabin (Day 368)

Hello, hello.

This isn’t a morning page, it’s an evening page. It’s 10:04 PM, Friday, November 22nd. I’ve been sequestered, resting, taking supplements, coughing a lot. I feel like ass. Half of it is the cold, and the other half is just being idle and cooped up.

But that’s not why I’m here. I wanted to turn on the recorder and drop a recollection before I forgot it.

I’ve had this recurring dream for — I don’t know how long. I’d say I’ve dreamt it at least seven or eight times in different forms. It’s about my cabin.

A lot of people know I have a cabin in West Virginia. I only lived there full time for a year. Then I visited on weekends. When I was in California, I hardly ever went — I’d have friends check up on it. When I was on the East Coast this summer, I spent some time out there cleaning it up, assessing what it needed. It’s a special place. I’ve had it for 20 years now — closed on September 11th, 2004.

But this recurring dream is about the cabin. Except it’s not the cabin. It’s a different cabin. In my dream, it’s always the same one, and I can picture it with as much detail as I can picture my own.

My actual cabin: you drive up a road in West Virginia, winding up a ridge, and my driveway is on the left, set back in the woods. The dream cabin is on a windy road that follows a stream — very much modeled on Route 84 in California, which goes from Woodside down through La Honda toward San Gregorio. That exact vibe, but set in the Appalachians. I know it from the vegetation and the pitch of the hills.

In my dream, I’m always driving that winding road, and sometimes I’m going to the cabin and sometimes I’m passing it for some other reason. The driveway just peels off to the right on the outside of a curve, goes up about ten feet in elevation, and you park right there. The cabin sits maybe 30 or 40 feet off the road — a low-slung one-room cabin, set a little into the earth. Not a root cellar, but halfway.

And whenever I stop there, the cabin is in a really sad state of disrepair. Almost uninhabitable. But I can remember things I’ve done there from other dreams. I visited so vividly that the memories carry over. Last night: ink drawings hanging from the rafters to dry, cabin in its usual state of disrepair. Another time: cleaning the wood stove, finding rotten wood in the walls. Another time: trying to move it further from the road. Another time: there was an animal pen behind it and down a small hill.

And it’s weird — not only do I have the dream over and over, I know what it means. My brain telling me I’ve neglected the real cabin in West Virginia and I’m dooming myself to visit one day and find it uninhabitable. Gone. I’ve woken up from this dream absolutely certain that was my cabin, that that was how it was situated. And then I’d lay there half awake and remind myself: no, that’s the dream cabin.

So when I went back this summer, I spent a few days there and just cleaned the living hell out of it. It had gotten musty inside — I opened up the windows, put a fan in, let fresh air blow through for like three weeks. I still need to replace the carpet or steam-clean everything. But remarkably: it’s in perfectly fine shape. I need to repair some plumbing, but if I put a day’s work into that, fired everything up, I could just start living there. It’s fine. It withstood years of being idle. Its own well, its own septic tank. The only public utility I rely on is electricity — costs me about $8 a month.

And then last night I dreamed of it again. The dream cabin.

So now I have a record for the next time I dream of it. I don’t have other recurring dreams that I know of. This one doesn’t repeat in the sense that the details change every time — but the road, the landscape, the stream, the way the cabin and its driveway are situated: always the same. I can feel that place. I know exactly where I parked last night. I know what kind of car I was driving. I know which door I went through. So vivid. And yet the details change every time.

Maybe talking about it out loud will somehow release it. Sometimes a year goes by between cabin dreams. But now I have a living record of it. November 22nd, 2024.

I’m going to get ready for bed.