This quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas runs over and over through my head tonight, a near-perfect expression of being homesick for a place or a time or both. For me, it's always Amsterdam; I dream many times a week of being there, and try to imagine a scenario that would ever allow me to return, but it's hard to do that when even the purchase of a new pair of sandals from Wal-Mart wreaks enough budgetary havoc to give me pause. In some ways, my life was awful four or five years ago compared to now, because there was no love in it. In some other ways, though, I wish I'd appreciated how good I had it back then.
Strangely, my dream-Amsterdam contains several places that, though they do not exist in the actual city, remain consistent from dream to dream: an amusement park; an arcade full of tiny, authentic Asian restaurants; a wooden museum surrounded by lush tropical foliage. I also spend a lot of dream-time in the coffeeshops, though, and all of those are real.
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I periodically dream that I am between towns again - in a dream life, I live between the two cities, not by choice, often startled to realise that I haven't been home/have forgotten to return to London.
I think that these dreams are dreams to do with unfinished business and untaken roads, our subconsciouses sorting out where we are, where we were, and where we want to be.