The Place with a Partial Name

While my sleep has always been kind of messed up, my actual trauma happened when I was 17-26 years old. Not surprisingly, images from this time period appear frequently in my dreamspace.

I moved hundreds of miles away for college, and then again for grad school. I often dream I am in school, in a new city. Usually the appearance is a mishmash of my university towns, Lincoln, NE and Corvallis, OR. Sometimes I dream I am in a second master’s program or PhD program, and usually that location is Ohio, and I have no idea why. Like literally someone or something in my dream says “Ohio,” and very occasionally a city name but I can never remember upon waking if it’s Cleveland or Cincinnati.

But that mishmash of places, that is clearly college but not Ohio, I tend to think of it as The College Town. It is full of brick, and walkable streets, and weird little stores. I am usually college-aged myself in these dreams, though not always. Sometimes I know I am older, and I am back to visit.

Recently I dreamed of it again. This time, someone in the dream called it by name. I couldn’t recall it entirely upon waking, all I have is this:

I think I have a name for The College Town, at least a partial one:

North XXXXfork (possibly -pork or -pack, but I think it’s-fork)

Rarely are there names in my dreams, and if they are it’s pretty clear: Ohio. “Ancient” “Greece” (Xena). Panem. The name isn’t new or created by my subconscious.

I had read something in passing about Discworld, so maybe my brain was trying to recreate “Ankh-Morpork.”

It is funny that I constantly ask my subconscious for answers, to eschew symbols and just tell me what it wants, and this is the kind of answer it produces. Good one.