It is interesting, how dreams are rooted in reality. A few weeks ago, I had a fantastic dream about our whole family travelling to Ussuriysk (a town in the Far East of Russia). It was sunny, warm, and beautiful there. We wondered through the streets (I was half-amused, half-sad that I didn’t recognize anything). We went to a local historical museum. Kids made friends with a couple of local kids who spoke excellent English (and I told their parents how impressed I was that their kids had no accent at all!).
In the meantime, we learned that our hotel reservation has fallen through and we had nowhere to sleep. The family our kids made friends with invited us to stay with them. Turned out, they were super-wealthy and had a big great mansion (somehow it was important in my dream that they were either Georgian or Armenian). Plenty of space for everyone! Still, there were some odd frictions among the adults, so eventually I was able to find a small motel where our family could stay for a few nights (the toilets and showers were awful and the owner of the motel kept hiking up the price; I was getting rather angry about that).
At one point, I realized that I didn’t bring any presents for my old teacher, who still lived at the same army base not too far from Ussuriysk. How could I go visit her empty-handed? I kept worrying and agonizing about it.
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I was telling my kids about this dream, laughing about how it was so totally random, and then it struck me that it wasn’t random at all. There were overlaps with real-life events.
When J and I travelled in Italy back in 2001, out hotel reservation fell through and we had to scramble at the last moment and ended up in Hotel Positano – in a rather unpleasant little room (two mattresses on the floor and a shared bathroom).
And here’s another connection. When my family moved to the Far East from Latvia in 1986, we flew into the airport near Vladivostok, then took a bus to Ussuriysk. It was a very long trip – the flight from Moscow to Vladivostok was 8.5 hours, and the bus ride was probably close to 3.5 or 4 hours. We arrived in Ussuriysk late at night, and there wasn’t an easy way to get to the military base from there at that hour. We found a hotel and walked in, suitcases and all. Unfortunately, there were no rooms available. I remember my mom trying to convince the lady who worked at the front desk – that we had no place to go, that we would have to spend the night in the streets, that they had a young child (I was 8 and usually I hated it when my parents referred to me as the “baby”, but at that point I was too tired to care).
The woman agreed to help us. There was a “luxury” room reserved for some general, who wasn’t going to show up until a day later. She let us have it for the night.
That room was fancy – I don’t remember it all that well, but I remember thinking “Wow!!! Fancy!!!!” There was just one bed, but it was a giant bed – the biggest bed I’d ever seen. All three of us could fit on it with plenty of space left over.
The next morning, my parents decided to take a cab to the army base. When we gave the address to the driver, he looked like he was about to kick us out. I suppose human decency won over, and he drove us to the end of the world. The paved road ended a little ways after we left Ussuriysk. The taxi driver continued on the narrow dirt road (I can only imagine the cursing that must have been going through his head). When we got to the gates of the army base, it looked like there was nothing beyond – just trees. I remember wondering if we were going to live in the middle of a forest. The taxi turned around, a cloud of dust behind it, and went back to Ussuriysk, with its paved roads and luxury hotel suites.
