Dream diary: The coffee house

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 1, 2023

One morning, earlier this week, I dreamed that I had purchased a house. It was located in or near the downtown of a small city, possibly in the South. The neighborhood was notable for handsome two- or three-story buildings with red-brick facades. Some of the sidewalks were built from similar red bricks.

In the dream, one night — possibly but not necessarily my first night in the new house — I went to sleep on a couch in a room off of the kitchen. The following morning, I discovered that there were people in the building. But more than that: There was a public business being run in the kitchen!

Somehow, I had bought a house that hosted an active coffee shop. People would come in from early morning through relatively late at night for coffee, tea, cocoa and snacks. They would sit at a bar in the kitchen, which like other rooms in the house featured wonderful light, and converse with one another, or with the baristas, and read and work on their computers.

This was a staggering discovery. I was appalled to realize that I had purchased a house without knowing that it was the site of an ongoing business. How had I not noticed this before?! I was angry at my real estate agent and my lawyer for not helping me learn this key piece of information. I was also embarrassed at my own enormous oversight. I had completed a major transaction without knowing a vital, glaring fact about the property!

I wondered about the possibility of closing down the coffee shop. But part of me was loath to do that — the shop was open late (at least some nights), and it therefore provided a valuable community space.

I became enormously anxious about the coffee shop’s legal status. I convinced myself that the shop had some kind of ironclad contract that prevented me from evicting it from my home if I deemed it necessary to do so. And I began to wonder who was collecting rent from the shop. I feared that it was not me; after all, I hadn’t even known about the existence of the shop in the first place!

That, to the best of my recollection, is where the dream left off.