Over the past year or so, I've been having what I'll call a stress dream over finding an apartment because I suddenly realize I have to go back to college.

I graduated from the University of Iowa over twenty years ago. In all the time I lived there, through two dorm rooms, one sorority house and three apartments with approximately fifteen roommates, I don't recall losing any sleep over where I was going to live. 

I didn't go to graduate school in Iowa City. I went to graduate school in Kansas City, as an adult living with my now husband.

I have no idea why I've constructed this storyline in my head.

I realized last night that I have a created a whole town in dreamland that doesn't exist in reality, and I've revisited it several times now.

There's the two-story duplex with the leaky sunporch and hilly back garden planted with flowers I don't know how to grow. Its windows and doors don't lock, and I'm constantly closing the shades. It has a pool I have no idea how to chlorinate. It's on a street that doesn't exist and that I've researched several times over the past year in my dreams, trying to find my way back to my bedroom there, the one with the four-poster bed I've never owned.

The union where I buy groceries in my dreams is located just south of a four-story library I never saw in real life but where I study constantly in my dreams, sure I'm about to fail. There is a cupola at the top that plays calliope music at all times.

Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens.

In this town, I keep driving past a row of restaurants in Omaha that doesn't exist. I really like the Mexican one on the end with an ice cream parlor adjacent.

Brown paper packages tied up with ribbons.

We try to get a table more than once at the Mexican restaurant and are turned away because our group is too big. I don't recognize the people in my group, but they are very important to me.

The row of restaurants turns into a train line into the north loop of Chicago. I am very worried about missing my transfer to the library on the north end that I've never been to. Someone important lives two blocks south. There are no Ubers, only cabs. I can never catch one. I get back on the train to Naperville.

Snow geese that fly with the moon on their wings.

At the end of the line, a hyperloop takes me back to my sorority house in Iowa City. It has burned down, its ashes still smoking.

I flee, park my car in a six-story parking garage by Currier Hall, where I have a room on retainer up three flights of stairs. My parking space is eternal.

My cat lives there. I will always forget to feed it. It will cry out every time I open the door, and I will be terrified I have starved it, because I am so stupid I forgot to feed it.

I don't know which cat. There have been five in my adult life.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I've been back to this place enough times over the past few years that I recognize the stairwell in the dorm, the elevator that spins when I try to take it to a floor that no longer exists. It makes me nauseaus to get on the elevator, but I still do it, and it never goes where I think it will go. It spits me out on a different floor every time. The doors are adorned with handwritten welcome signs for kids I never met, never will meet. 

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.

The garden in the duplex dies and revives as different people move in behind it and sink swimming pools with no water in the backyard. Nobody ever buys the vacant lot next door.

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes.

Sometimes the duplex bedrooms grow huge and comprise city blocks filled with young people I've never met but who know my name. They never get out of bed but call to me to come join them.

Silver white winters that melt into springs.

I don't understand this dream, or why it keeps coming to me over and over throughout the years, much like the mansion with the ghosts in the ceiling tiles and the ballroom floors that haunted me ten years ago. The one with the roof that kept burning and falling, over and over, the one with the basement that filled with water every few minutes, then drained to reveal rotting floorboards.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I wonder why these neighborhoods are so real to me.