Furry Dream

I dreamt I was in my grandmother's apartment on Brighton Beach. The apartment had new occupants who had painted the bedroom walls deep purple. They had kept the kitchen wallpaper, and I was examining the pattern closely. It was yellow with a repeat pattern of a kitchen stove with pots and pans hanging above it drawn in black line with white ornamental dots, dashes, and swirls. In the corner of the bedroom I found an old birthday gift that was for both my grandmother and her best friend Sue. In the dream they had the same August birthday.

In real life Sue and Willy were my grandparents' friends who lived in the same apartment building. Sue was perpetually suntanned and slender with a loud husky voice and Willy had a pencil-thin mustache and was pretty quiet. This shared birthday gift in the dream was an elaborately framed needlepoint with their birthdate embroidered on it. Attached somehow were Willy's shoes, which were 70's platform boots spray-painted gold to look bronzed.

The new occupants weren't around, or maybe my husband and I were the new residents, but in another room a family had moved in with twenty cats in cages and five white metal birdcages filled with little blue birds. I was thinking this must be why my lungs feel furry. I recognized this family as my real-life current neighbors.