I dreamed I was walking home to Seattle from San Antonio. I was researching popular music since American Colonial days, because I was writing a thesis that both US history and Chinese history could be divided into three eras: colonial, industrial, and modern, and that this division was reflected in the evolution of popular music forms in both places.
In San Antonio, I had visited a museum on Chinese music, and was on my way home. I was walking, of course. I wanted to avoid some hills, so I thought I'd follow the river bank I was walking along, probably the Pecos, instead of hiking up to the top of the cliff face. But the bank narrowed to nothing up ahead, past a pile of boulders and a tall, thin cedar. I turned back, past an escarpment of blood-red jasper, and hiked up to the top of the cliffs after all.
I heard a deep bellow and found myself approaching a herd of bison, mostly red and deep brown and black, but with one cream-colored bull. The bull was NOT happy that I was there. I saw a gate and let myself into a broad corral that butted up behind a large white house. But there were cows with calves in there, and they, too, were not happy to see me. So I knocked on the back door, and asked the residents if I could just pop through their house and out to the street, so I could avoid bothering the bison. They were kind enough to let me do that.
Out on the main street, I looked at Google Maps on my phone to figure out where I was, and found I was in R, Texas. Out in West Texas, there was a Q, and R, an S, a T, and a U, all clustered south and west of Birmingham, Texas. I knew that Birmingham had a whole center devoted to Victorian Texan Culture, so I went there to do some more research.
There were replicas for sale of an old-fashioned instrument called a hand calliope, which was kind of a cross between a bag pipe, a harmonica, a concertina, and a player piano? You filled it up with air, and wound it up, and a spring pump pushed the air out of a rotating, reeded contraption, so that it played a wheezy song.
I was looking up the patent for this fascinating device, and then I woke up.
