I dreamed I lived in a historic American city, in about the 1920s, and my life was a sort of mashup between Middlemarch and Gone with the Wind. I was a cross between Scarlet O’Hara and Rosamund Vincy, and my Dr. Lydgate/Ashleigh love interest had a medical practice on 9th Flu Street and was engaged to my older, uglier sister.
The doctor’s name was Neville Clair, and I knew he preferred me, but he was a very upright, principled, honorable man, full of high ideals. To make my sister angry, I would call him her Angel Clair, after the Thomas Hardy character. He would turn red when he heard me, but she never got it. She just thought I couldn’t remember his name.
I wandered away from my mother while she had me out shopping for a bridesmaid dress to wear at my sister’s wedding. I made my way through a luxurious hotel and scandalized everyone by entering the colored areas. But on the other side of the hotel was the 9th Flu Street office, and I was determined to win the doctor away from my sister.
When I found the doctor, I tried to start flirting, but he hurried me out of the shop to find my mother and sister so he could take us all on some outing. We were all walking along a lake when I saw two puppies treading water a ways from the bank. They were too little to swim well, and weren’t making any progress toward the shore. I jumped in to save them, and the doctor jumped in after me, and we brought them in to safety, and I decided to keep them.
As the doctor was driving us home, I got him to promise to marry me instead. Then I asked him why the city had a 1st Flu Street, a 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 10th Flu Streets, and whether it had anything to do with a series of flu epidemics in the 19th century. He said that was exactly it, that each street marked the limit to which that numbered epidemic had spread. Then I woke up.
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