It is mostly such a mundane dream. My wife and I are outside our home. We’re youngish, roaming about in our middle years. This is not the house we live in, nor a place we’ve ever lived in, but easily recognized as a standard, pleasant American middle class dream place, part of a planned development, a few stories tall, with a yard and neighbors in like houses. Not quite homes cut from the same design, but homogenized with individual flares and nuances. Our home is stucco and off-white.

As I say, we were outside, in sunny weather, in the backyard. Our cats walk about, being cats. One began scratching his claws on a headboard. “No,” I chase him away, telling my wife, “Don’t let him scratch this.” I set about repairing it. Adding a strip of wire grid that will keep murder mittens from scarring the wood. I pursue this past time for a period. It’s more tedious than I expected.

Railroad tracks are laid not far from our backyard. I’m up in the house, on the second floor, looking down when a train comes by. It’s an old-fashioned steam locomotive. I can see into the neighbor’s backyard on the right. They have a little train, about knee high, just an engine and coal car, that goes out and greets the train when it passes. I see this several times in the dream and conclude that the neighbors have a motion sensor along the rails. Or maybe they’re just sitting inside, waiting for a train. I never see them, though I know the man is bald, in his late fifties/early sixties, white and wears glasses and flannel shirts.

I’m back in the backyard, working in the bed headboard. It’s an old piece but mass produced, one we purchased from J.C. Penney when we were young, with decoupage flowers.

The cat, a ginger, starts talking to me. His enunciation isn’t very good but it’s clear enough that I know that he’s talking about birds. I snort this away, amused. Cats and birds are like sun and sky. The cat insists, “You have to see these birds, Michael.”

I follow the cat just to appease him. We go down a sloping meadow to a small cottage surrounded by glossy dark green bushes. “There they are,” the cat tells me.

I hear the birds before I see them and know that they’re parrots. Five of them, green, red, blue, and yellow prominent among them, flock toward us, chatting at us while coming up to see what and who we are. I worry about the cat and birds fighting and hurting one another, so I’m wary and cautious. But the birds interest me. I tell the cat that they’re parrots. He’s intrigued. I tell the birds that the animal with me is a cat and that he and I live up the hill from them.

I then see a snake. Don’t know what kind it is. It moves fast and is gone. I worry again: will it bite or harm me, the cat, the birds? I tell the cat, “There’s a snake here, watch it.” He’s immediately interested in trying to find it.

I retreat back up to my house with him, away from the colorful, noisy parrots. Back in my yard, I tell my wife, “There are parrots down there. Come down and see them.”

That’s where it ends.