More Than Mere Polyester Would Suggest

Earlier this year, I attended a conference at which I was given a really nice fleece jacket. Really nice.

I’ve known for a while that I harbor a somewhat extreme love for this fleece jacket; it’s become my comfy home top layer of choice, getting some wear pretty much every day. But I hadn’t realized quite how important it was to me, I guess.

Because I was surprised this morning to awaken from a dream about the fleece jacket. I was on a very small plane, and there wasn’t room for my stuff in the cabin, so they took everything from me — including the fleece jacket — and put it in some exterior compartment of the plane, kind of like the luggage compartment of really big busses.

When we landed, what they handed back to me was not my fleece jacket. It looked like it, but it was a small, and I was pretty sure mine was a medium. I tried it on to check, and while the small did fit, it wasn’t quite as comfortable as I remembered my fleece jacket having been. And then I remembered the slight oddity about how my zipper pulls are attached, and realized that I could tell if this fleece jacket was mine by checking those pulls.

This was not my fleece jacket.

So I circled back around to where the rest of the passengers — maybe a hundred of them, which is weird considering how small that plane was — were waiting for their bags, and asked someone who had handed me this fleece jacket. Everybody pointed to one guy, who at first seemed to be about ten feet tall, and then appeared to be sitting up on a high shelf. I yelled up to him about the fleece jacket dilemma, and tossed up the one that wasn’t mine. He looked around and tossed me back down… a t-shirt. One I’d never seen before.

When I woke up, I was in negotiations with him to at least get back the small fleece jacket, if I couldn’t actually get mine. And was surprised by the level of relief I felt upon discovering that it was only a dream.

I am super curious what this fleece jacket — which I am wearing as I write — has come to stand in for in my unconscious. Whatever it is, I’m clinging to it pretty fiercely.