Last night was such a dream.  It happened twice now that I have dreamt of trains.  I remember the last time it happened the train was in motion.  Rolling alongside the freeway i was driving on.  The train seemed to be frozen in space, and i was driving so fast.  I remember looking over then and seeing the windows lit up from inside.  People motionless, and yet keeping pace with me.  This dream was a train, but nothing else was the same.

This dream started normally.  I was just standing on an empty gravel lot.  There weren’t any cars around that i could see, or any people either.  I couldn’t tell you how i got there, or what i was doing there.  I know that i was exactly in the place I wanted to end up, but couldn’t tell you how it happened.  I remember looking up at the sky and the air was so clear, the clouds were painted on the sky.  Framing the blue sky.  I remember wondering if it was a painted backdrop, and it looked so clear and crisp that it looked too real to be real.

In front of me, i saw an old fashioned train car.  A row of them actually, stretching off into the distance.  These cars looked so old to me.  From the golden age of trains, when train rides were done in suits and hats.  The trim of the train cars were green and gold, the main body color was a rusty red color.  There were gold metal fixtures on the outside of the train.  I don’t have words for what they are called.  I remember knowing that this wasn’t a vision into the past, i was looking into something more recent than that.

I knew my way to the back of the train, and remember that my vision never wavered from the back door of the last car.  I saw the steps in my mind, and it was like i was guided by a rope.  Pulling me towards the door.  So smooth that I wanted to look at my feet to see how i wasn’t bobbing slightly as i walked.  I couldn’t move my neck.  I couldn’t look down.  I tried for several steps, and started to worry, and then i remembered that I can’t move my neck here either.  Is my real world bending into the dream world?  Melding into one where my limitations here are expressed even in these vivid dreams?

I reached the steps and climbed them.  It was the strangest sensation.  Of knowing my legs are bending, but not feeling anything move, no pull of muscles or movement of my feet.  But i climbed the stairs none the less.  Nothing changed, but the level of my view.  And yet, when i climbed that last step and stood on the back platform everything seemed to shift.  Suddenly the air seemed dusty.  Like a dust storm had just ended.  Like someone had just shaken out old linen in a closed room.  The air seemed filled with dust, and the air seemed dry.  I remember noticing before how clear the air felt, and i remember thinking it was such good air to breath.

Here the air seemed old.  Like it was stale, and worn down through years of use.  Like something had contained all the air into this train, and it was frozen here in a dusty land that wasn’t a part of everything else in the world.  It seemed like air in a desert, but without the heat.  A still air and heavy almost on my shoulders.

I need to come back to this another day.  My mind is tired trying to find a way to describe two worlds being so close together.  But then, so far away that they couldn’t even seem to mingle the air with each other.  I need to think more on what i saw in the train, how to describe something like that to myself.  Something, bothered me about how ornate and unfinished everything looked.  It was like a half made train was placed here and I was let in to explore.  This seems like an abrupt end, but my mind is fading and I need to think.