And then realized I had a shift the next day and I had to get home to Toronto to do it. And then woke up, thank goodness.
The Buddhist message is clear, and possibly the psychological one as well-- too much baggage-- but underlying all is the trauma of 1996: weeding through All The Stuff to decide what I absolutely had to have, and somehow getting it back home.
With all that, in the dream I still wanted to go to the bookstore and get more stuff: this being the Heiwadai bookstore that crops up regularly in my dreams, the one that's a good mile down the road from the station, amid fields and sparse buildings. I've never figured why it's there and not where any of the real bookstores were; have wondered if 'down the road' is supposed to translate as 'several stations away from Ikebukuro', only in body-space and not train-terms. But in any case, 'the Heiwadai bookstore' is as much a fixture in my dreamlife as 'the apartment over near Madison', the perfect apartment from the 70s.