Dream Journal: Finding the Museum

I’m visiting Manhattan, and my host asks me to guide four preteen boys to a fancy new art museum I’ve never heard of. I can’t figure out how to get to the museum even though it’s only about a mile south of the apartment, in the Seventies on the Upper East Side. I start walking with the boys, and they’re singing a song they made up, with one of them on guitar, and I’m worried that onlookers will stare at them and think they’re provincial; but fortunately it turns out we’re accompanied by a camera crew which is filming them for a reality show, so the onlookers view them with admiring curiosity.

I repeatedly ask people how to get to the museum, but I don’t understand their directions. Finally, in the vestibule of an apartment building, I meet a friendly, plump but attractive woman who’s taking mail out of an overstuffed box. There’s not only mail in it, there’s a loaf of bread and a bunch of bananas. I laugh in recognition: I’m a parent too and I have experience taking food out of my mailbox after kids have put it in there. She considerately takes time to give me directions to the museum, but I still have trouble reading the subway map at the station: the names of the subway lines have been changed since I was there last, and the map is an interactive touch-screen rather than a simple readable sheet of paper. At dream’s end, it’s still not clear whether I’ll get to the museum or not.

Interpretation: This is all so transparent it hardly needs any. It’s a window into my life.