Two weeks since we left Europe, and not an evening has gone by yet where Caroline and I haven’t been retracing or reinterpreting our vacation in Scandinavia through dreams. Sometimes, our travels while sleeping are strange tasks that require working through labyrinths of peculiar constructs taken from fragments of something our minds have assigned to a hybridized version of a place. Still, there’s no mistaking that they are created from elements of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or a combination of all three.
On one hand, it’s great that our brains are still processing our trip of a million impressions but at other times, the nocturnal chores being performed in our skulls become disruptive of finding a relaxing sleep. I feel that we are likely contributing to these repetitions of experiences and creating new ones because, after two weeks of being home, I’m working on the 6th day of our trip at this point, with 22 more days still to go. The idea that I will likely have another month and a half of writing and processing photos ahead of me means that Caroline and I will continue to be immersed in our memories of Scandinavia and enrich our dreams with the intensity of processing the experiences during our waking hours.
Two more weeks later, in the middle of October and a full month after our return, our dreams are still dwelling in Sweden. Repetitive pattern matching with maps and objects from Stockholm accompany my sleep just as waking thoughts of our travels guide my blog posts. I wonder if our dreams will shift to Norway in the next couple of days as I start documenting our time in Oslo and beyond.
Sixty days of writing about a nearly 30-day trip had the effect of keeping the two of us deeply immersed in the details of our lengthy vacation on an almost constant basis. Subsequently, we took it all to sleep. Waking over these months was to fragments of travels I believe we both hope are the work of cementing the beautiful moments we shared into our experiential memory in order to never forget another perfect vacation.
As for the photo, nothing says dreams like thoughts of Norwegian hot dogs, a.k.a. Pølser.