I started having the ramen dream, I am fairly sure, during the pandemic. If not, it would have started fairly close-to. Certainly, I was having the ramen dream sometime after the second time I visited Japan, in March/April 2019. Equally certainly, before the ramen dream, I would have told you that recurring dreams were the stuff of narrative facility in various dramatic writing. If I knew they were real, I didn’t know know it.
The ramen dream is recurring in that I have it approximately once a month. I’ve skipped a few months recently; then had it again last night. It is not recurring in the TV-trope mode, where the exact same thing happens identically every time; rather, the exact same set of circumstances and feelings play out.
They are these: I am travelling in Japan. I am always travelling with family. Normally, it is my entire (immediate) family: my parents, my brother, and my sister. (I travelled to Japan in 2017 with my brother; and returned in 2019 with my brother and my sister.)
We have been in the country for some period of time that seems luxurious: two or three weeks or more. It is always the last day of the trip; a trek to Haneda Airport is scheduled for 5pm that night. And at some point over the course of the day I realize that in all my time in Japan on that trip, I have somehow forgotten to eat any ramen.
Now, another recurring thought occurs. There is a ramen shop I would like to visit, because I visited it before and enjoyed it. It is a “safe bet,” neither the best nor worst ramen I’ve ever had, but it beats any consideration of trying a random nearby ramen restaurant and (potentially) being disappointed. I do not know exactly where this old favourite is, but it is in a neighbourhood that I know how to get to, and I am confident that once there, I can retrace my steps to this ramen shop in by wandering around within two or three potential blocks.
Getting to this neighbourhood will always require a train transfer (well, what in Japan doesn’t?), and getting off a stop earlier than a main juncture, and doing a bit of walking. It is also possible, each time, to walk directly to this ramen shop by simply walking north from the place where my family and I are staying, and walking for perhaps a half an hour, rather than taking a train; and I always weigh this option.
I suppose it’s important to mention that the ramen shop that I would like to visit in this dream does not exist. It is not based on any actual ramen restaurant that my brother, my sister, or I ever visited in the real Japan. Moreover, its neighbourhood does not exist. At best, it vaguely resembles some outlying areas of Osaka that we wandered through one day; but in the dream, the entire adventure is theoretically taking place in Tokyo, and Tokyo is hard to mistake for anywhere else.
In my dream-sense of this phantom geography there is a park three blocks west of the ramen shop, where we went wandering one day. It is a very North American park. There is also a toy shop near the ramen shop, which is not unusual for Japan; but this is an old toy shop that sells very un-Japanese toys, like antique paper and that tom-tom toy from The Karate Kid, Part II. (Which takes place in Japan.) (My point is, this isn’t what you generally find in a toy store near a ramen shop in Tokyo today.)
What happens from these identical premises tends to vary. Sometimes I do in fact find the ramen shop and have ramen, though this is rare. More often, the dream skips ahead to the arrival at the airport and some kind of acknowledgement that I am disappointed that I missed out on authentic Japanese ramen while on my trip. Occasionally the dream makes it through security or onto the plane; there might be some other fracas.
I was in my mid-forties when I began having this, my first recurring dream. The only comparable dreamscape prior to the ramen dream was my dream-sense of the geography around my grandfather’s cottage; it was not entirely realistic to the actual landscape in Muskoka (though not terribly unrecognizable, if certain peculiarities of scale were ignored) but its inconsistencies were consistent from dream to dream, and I always knew my way around it as easily in each dream as I did the real thing in real life.
Every other dream I’ve ever had, that I can recall, was unique in every aspect, and (in my opinion, anyway) not terribly interesting. I never really had spectacular dreams, the kinds run through with the vivid imagination that might have spurred me to write a fantasy novel or build a time machine. But I love the ramen dream: absolutely love it. If it is an anxiety dream, it’s the best possible one. Even the premise of anxiety within it — that there’s something I want to do and I’ve run out of time to do it — is somehow never presented with any actual felt anxiety. It’s a data point, only; an issue to be observed, understood, and rectified. I smile in the morning when I wake up from the ramen dream, because it’s so silly, and so weird, and so welcome.