Dream lighthouse

How does a fiercely private person go about writing a blog? Good question!

In the early hours of this morning I dreamed I was climbing the stairs inside a lighthouse. At the top there was a window and I looked out. Although the tower had felt stable while I climbed, when I looked out the window I was surprised to see the view of the ground and trees gyrating as if the tower were flexing with the wind. I caught the banister to steady myself and tried to look again, but I could not find the window or the glass was painted over. When my dizziness passed, I walked down the stairs and found myself in an unfamiliar English village. I walked into a small shop. The people in the shop were kind and fed me tea--a woman and a man who might have been her brother, a double amputee. I listened to them as they showed me photos of family and newspaper clippings and keepsakes on the shelves. The woman left to tend to chores and errands. After I had continued talking to the man for a while, he suddenly cried out in pain that his had left his prosthetic legs on too long and had to remove them.

Then I had a few minutes to myself in a back room, took some things out of my bags and examined them, gathered my belongings together, and went back through the shop to go out into the town and find a place to stay for the night. The people I had met were gone, so I could not thank them for their kindness, and a different man stood in the shop instead, looking like he belonged there, saying nothing. I left to find a hotel.

It was an uncharacteristically coherent dream. The only thing I don't remember is... what I was looking at in the back room. I think it was a letter written long ago from someone I knew to someone I did not know.