I woke up from a dream this morning that seemed far too ordinary yet again. This time, it was a walk around the block of my parents’ house with my dad. It’s my parents’ “thing” to exercise by walking around our block a few times. This seems extremely mundane, repetitive, and ridiculous when you think about the fact that they literally live across the street from Golden Gate Park, one of the nicest parks in this entire country, but my parents claim they don’t have time to walk all the way across the street to Golden Gate Park for daily walks. They also said that since the avenue above us is a steep hill, the incline helps with their exercise. While that second part may be true, this has always sounded pretty pathetic to me.

My dad and I were walking around the block on this walk. He does this walk every day even when I am home, and I’ve never gone with him, nor have I ever offered to go with him. He’s never asked me to go, either. But for whatever reason, we were walking this boring walk together in this dream, and we were surprisingly having normal father-daughter conversation. When I say “normal,” I mean.. if our relationship were a “normal” father/daughter relationship, which it isn’t. We had a reasonably decent conversation about work and things that were annoying me there. We talked about my friends and their lives. We talked about New York and potentially staying… forever. This conversation was too good to be true, and halfway through the dream, I thought, yes, this is definitely a dream. There is zero way this could be a real walk and a real conversation.

Then, I woke up and confirmed my suspicion. And I also hoped that given how strange this “normal” dream was that nothing bad was waiting for me around the corner in reality.