Wednesday, August 29, 2007

New York City Dreams

In our new place, our windows face the street, and an inner courtyard of sorts. Now, the streets are less busy than the avenues (for those that don't know, in Manhattan, streets run from east to west while the avenues are north to south, so you can have a Seinfeldian intersection of 1st and 1st and not break any laws of physics), and the avenue that we live on is one of the least traveled on all the Upper West Side. So, the street noise that floats up to our apartment is minimal.

However, the street noise from our Akron apartment, which looked over into a large wooded hill, was even less. I knew which of my neighbors was returning home before I even saw their cars from the sound that the cars made in the infrequently visited apartment cul de sac.

Therefore, the trucks that come by in the early morning, while not really waking me up or disturbing me, cause me to have interesting dreams. I think the first morning, a garbage truck idling while it's workers grabbed the trash on the curbs - an operation that takes less than a minute - made me dream that I was asleep at my in-laws' house, and that my father-in-law was mowing the lawn with his riding mower.

I'm truly not normal.

Since then, I've had more car chase dreams than I think I've had in my entire life prior to moving here. I don't really think of myself as a violent car chase kind of person (see my post on roller coasters for confirmation). I think, however, that this street-noise driven dream phenomenon will dissipate after a few weeks. At least, I hope it does, as I'm not sure I can deal with 2 years of car chase dreams. They make me wake up slightly terrified.

6 comments:

craziequeen said...

Hey Mar-see-ah, nice to see your settling into your new home.

I remember when we moved in here I didn't sleep for the first three weeks because I wasn't used to road noise. We moved from a sleepy English village to a small town and live near a reasonably busy road.

You'll get used to the little bit of noise.

Hope there's plenty of room for your shoes :-)

cq

Anonymous said...

I am a NYC trash collector...sorry we woke you up. Usually its the compactor that is the loudest...did you hear the bags being crushed and pressed?

apricoco said...

I am SOOO JEALOUS! I want NYC street noise! All I have is Florida palm trees swaying. So boring. You are such a luck girl!

I am glad that you are settling in. Good luck with everything.

rebekah said...

You'll absolutely get used to it. And a few months from now, a family member will visit and say "Gosh, it's so loud here. I slept like crap." And you'll respond, "Really, I hardly even notice it." Of course, you'll be drinking a manhattan (it's after 9am!) and smoking a bubble gum cigarette (because the real thing is so gross).

Princess in Galoshes said...

You'll get used to it. We used to live over a main road where they would set up a farmer's market on Saturdays, and a "Parisian Street Fair" (read: overpriced yard sale of jun-que) and they would start setting up the tent poles etc. at 4:00 AM on my precious weekend days. I hated them very much, but after a couple weeks, I was able to sleep through it.

Selva said...
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