Most People Stop with the Z

I took a nap after work and got treated to one of my favorite kinds of dreams. Sometimes it's exploring a weird, impossibly labyrinthine house, sometimes it's a neighborhood or a city, and sometimes it's the woods. This one was mostly woods. Those are the best.

It started out in the neighborhood I grew up in. After some nebulous task and a conversation about it being unseasonably warm, I decided to go for a walk. The neighborhood had these sidewalks that wound around behind and betweeen a lot of the houses. There were several wooded patches and rustic-looking little playgrounds scattered around. That was where I headed. Just like in reality, it had been a long time since I had been there.

One of the little playground things was nearby. A lot of space had been cleared out but of course the whole area was bigger because there's always another corner to go around in dreams. I was surprised to see that they had even added two full-size swimming pools. There weren't any people around, though. Actually I didn't see any more people for the whole rest of the dream.

I wandered off another way, ended up at this one walkway that went up a hill towards the edge of the neighborhood and dead-ended. The rest of the trails were kind of clustered in an interior space but this one was just a straight shot off on its own. I don't know if the dead-end was always the plan or they just ran out of space. Both of the parallel streets also dead-ended when I lived there, but they've been extended since then. Anyway, I guess those two things were the main reasons this particular trail fascinated me as a kid.

So anyway, in the dream I walked up to the end, noticed the backyard of a house where one of my friends had lived. I saw the newer houses along the same line. At first I was going to turn back, but I could see that at least some of the forest was still back there, and enough people had walked that way to make a path that continued the line of the paved part. The new houses were odd and kind of cheap-looking, like decorated storage sheds or manufactured homes.

I started seeing weird trees with long twisted branches and stuff, which made me glad I had come this way. Past the houses, I got to the crest of the hill. It was familiar territory. The walk down led into a bunch of pines. I also saw a cleared area with rows of, I dunno, some kind of lettuce-y thing with big dark leaves and I heard dogs barking.

Up ahead, where there used to be power lines that traced the edge of the subdivision, there was a road. There was another wooded area on the other side of the road. I wanted to go farther, but the cats woke me up.