My night as an impressionist painting

That was fun!

It woke me and I write now so as not to lose the sense of it.

Into the osteria, into the Osteria, very much the Carl Bloch painting, I see it, I see it, I'm in it, but even as I am sat at the table it is all changing and the realism is moving into lines and dashes and strokes of colour. Looking upwards there is a - what is the name for this object - it's like a cake stand in design but it's got fruit on it. It's white and blue and covered in big juicy lemons. I pick one of the lemons up, it's real, physical, but in a very distinct impressionistic style, like, but not exactly like, Matisse. I can feel it, but it is still a painting that I am in. Or; it is a painting I am in, but it is real and it has form and dimension and scent.

The view pulls out and I am seeing a young woman, it's me, I recognise the brown hair, and it is being worn in a distinct way I used to use, with the top part of it pulled back into a pony tail and the rest left loose. Something like that. But when was this worn? I can only think of it on young girls and women in the 20th century, perhaps Edwardian. I don't know. I feel my hair being pulled up into it, and I am being dressed, this feels/looks like something very late Victorian, a taffeta(?) like material, stiff and rustling, black, or very dark charcoals and blues, high necked collar, small ruffles, tiny cameo at the neck. Is the rest of my hair being swept up into a bun? I don't know. A man is being painted right in front of me, to join me at whatever I am doing. He has a top hat but his eyes are too wide apart and I don't like him, the artist removes him before he is complete. Outside now, still in a painting, still very impressionist, a cobbled street that leads down to a harbour at night. Sailing boats in the harbour. Pretty, the men are coming up from the boats. I do not quite see them yet. I don't know if they are dashes/streaks in the painting to come.

I forgot the most important thing about this part; The young woman rests her arms on the table for a moment, and I see her black sleeves, white cuffs. When I squint, I see that hidden among the cuffs or perhaps replacing them are tiny white feathers. Looking really closely I can see they are formed at the base between separate fingers, and even, if one looks really closely, up by the cuticle of nails, but these really are minute. The tiny feathers on her wrist and fingers remind me of the fluffiness of feathered bantams legs. I look up to see if anyone else has noticed, but no-one has, and I think she pulls her sleeves further over her wrists to hide the more obvious feathers. She needs gloves to do this properly, but this place is baking hot as it is.

Suddenly I am too hot in this dress, and I am back in my bed, sweating slightly, realising that I am not awake, but dreaming that I am awake. I sink back in, temperature OK now.

Move now to a bridge over a river, the style is still loose but more realistic. It's an old stone arch bridge. Now I am a more mature woman, but not more than a decade in it (?) the black dress has been replaced by something much closer to Edwardian including a white ruffed blouse, softer, and my hair is definitely all up. No feathers that I can see. I am on the bridge above a river, but my eyes don't stay watching the water, they move to the bridge itself. Looking at myself on the bridge from outside, I see that the right upper side of the bridge has crumbled away. It is still a secure walkway, it's just that bit that would be a surface to walk over is no longer paved or whatever they do to it. So if you come from the right side of the ravine, you walk to the centre and there you step up onto the paved deck. The paved bit is where I am, leaning on the balustrade wall.

I pull away trying to form narrative. Where is this? A map instantly shows me the coastlines around the Med, but that doesn't help much.

That's the completion before I awoke. Now I can go back to the earlier part; where I recognised that if I was in the matrix, the program for me wouldn't be tall streets and high rise buildings, women in red dresses or me looking cool in black leather with lots of guns and cool shades. It would be something like this; and I saw an old fashioned typewriter, big and clunky, understanding that I could be shown the mechanics of dream making just as I could be shown how to take this typewriter apart, or I could just use the typewriter without really understanding how it works. There's no right/wrong to it, except of course, if a dream is going wrong, like a bust typewriter, it's good to know how to fix it.