The Result of Not Winding Down Properly After Work

I dreamed an essay just now. It was a eulogy of some sort for a colleague that no one liked, and it incorporated as part of its text an encounter with that colleague's surviving roommate or somesuch, a man I hadn't known until the death brought us into contact and who was also little worth knowing. I don't know a single word in the essay, but it had short paragraphs and one of the early ones, a section-ending paragraph it was, recorded our meeting and did some objective wondering about the man's feelings for his deceased roommate. It wasn't meant to be mean or judging or accusatory; I meant the short bit only to be an honest account or an honest conjecture, and having written it in I turned in the dream to wandering the imaginary cobbled streets of a hilly dream university (wide streets in a place faintly provincially German). Somehow the roommate read the account I had done—had the essay been published already?—and at the funeral told me he appreciated my candor; both he and I or maybe it was just he or just I were surprised that I hadn't taken the opportunity to expose his unlikeability and shade the account with personal grievances. "Hey it's no thing," I say and float back up the street without visualizing any actual funeral and I compose that encounter into the essay too, it being not-central to the essay's theme but it somehow completes the piece in a subtle and beautiful way that saturates my dream with feelings of importance and urgency, and in that moment I realize both that I am very thirsty and incredibly bored, so I wake up, decide immediately to get a drink in the bathroom, and am relieved I won't have to stay in a boring dream. But the feeling of urgency the dream gave me—I assume my body's response to doing some good writing (albeit in a dream without actual words) and not wishing to lose it—remained with me in waking, so I booted up the old computer to at least get the satisfaction of writing about writing well.

And now I'm going to hop back into my bed that smells more like me and less like fresh laundry than I would like despite frequent washing and laying down will feel new again and hopefully I can catch an hour or two of a new dream.