This morning I had a beautiful and strange dream, which, I suppose is par for the course for me.

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I’m driving through the English countryside in a sort of race, but it isn’t really a race so much as an homage to a Victorian writer who packed all of her belongings into a smallish buggy and traveled around England with her cat, Imogen. There are about twenty of us, each following her route across England. Some are taking this as a fun little trip, and others are trying to actually mirror her trip as closely as possible, dressing in Victorian-era clothing. There are even two buggies that are replicas of hers, which are quite impressive to the group, as you can imagine. Two or three people, myself included, bring a cat with them on the trip. I have a small cat the color of cafe au lait, whose name is also Imogen. She rides (mostly sleeps) in her cat bed, which is on the passenger seat of my red Honda, which they allow me to use in England even though it’s left-hand drive. Isn’t that nice of them?

The group is traveling sort of together and sort of separately. We’re not in a caravan, but we meet up at various points along the route to eat and talk, and at those times, the two buggy owners will take the participants for rides. All of the participants are either married couples or single people. There are no tour buses or large groups on this trip. I suspect it has something to do with the writer herself, a solitary but free-spirited person whose writing inspires wanderlust in her readers, as she encourages them to shake up their lives and not to be lulled into the trance of everyday living. She was far ahead of her time, and all of us who are on the trip feel a very close kinship both for her and for each other, despite the fact that none of us had met prior to this.

In the middle of the afternoon, we arrive at the main stopping point along the way, a large and grassy park near the ocean, with tall, leafy trees scattered plentifully throughout. The buggies are polished and gleaming, and the people who dressed in period clothing are out in all of their Victorian finery, laughing and talking near the buggies. One man is wearing a monocle and a pocket watch, and another man is wearing an elegant black suit, and his wife is wearing a long, white dress. Another woman shades herself underneath a parasol. There are about ten or twelve people wearing antique clothes, some of whom changed into them only for this part of the trip. I am wearing modern attire, jeans and a button-up shirt, with a gray, European-style suit jacket over the top.

My mom is at the park, volunteering, serving food and refreshments for the participants, but she is unfamiliar with the writer in question. She loves to volunteer for things, and she knew that I would be a part of this event, so she signed up. She walks over to one of the buggies, runs an admiring hand along its side, and makes a somewhat nonsensical comment about how ‘compactly’ people used to live back then, which makes a few of the people around her chuckle. The buggy’s owner is standing next to it, and she asks him to tell her a little bit about this writer. I pick up Imogen the cat, climb into the front seat of the beautifully restored buggy, and place her on the seat beside me. She sits in the sun and purrs, clearly enjoying herself.

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This was one of those dreams that was very beautiful to experience, but when I tried to write it down, I found that I had a hard time capturing its mood at first. I laughed just now as I re-read the first sentence; it’s just so strange and funny. Each of the individual words is completely normal, but there’s something about the way they are strung together into that particular sentence that is instantly both surreal and hilarious. A moment like that is why I think it’s so much fun to write out dreams and share them. It pitches you right out of reality in a very satisfying way.