The dream engine sends me to the museum

With my other half and one or more of my daughters (I faintly remember Tertia, but Secunda may also have been there) and someone else (male) who I don’t recall, it might have been a friend or my father-in-law. I think it was nominally the Rijksmuseum (not the Rijks Museum. I’m pedantic that way.) but it was smack in the centre of Amsterdam, not on the periphery of the centre where it is in waking life, and smaller than it ought to be, and it had a back entrance in the Kalverstraat where one could completely bypass security. Which was a very good thing because I found myself in the Kalverstraat at one point wearing only a T-shirt that reached barely to my hips, and all my other clothes were in the museum, in a short passage with doors on one side (probably to toilets), coat hooks on the other side, and a window at the end. There is actually a passage exactly like that in another museum, Flehite in Amersfoort, and I took pictures through that window once because something about the window-frame and/or the weather made the window look like art.

The museum itself was sort of disappointing: many of the things I expected, and had expressly come to see, had been (temporarily?) removed and replaced by an exhibition of art by children. Nice enough, but that wasn’t what I’d come for. No Flemish Primitives, for one. With flawless dream logic I was frantically searching for paintings by Josquin des Prez, who is of course roughly from the right time but a composer rather than a painter.

I was so busy sorting things out that I ended up missing almost the whole museum: the other people had already been in rooms I could only jog through breathlessly trying to catch up.

Eventually we got outside, on the bank of a canal (not the Amsterdam kind between paved streets, but the out-of-town kind with a sloped green bank) in the company of a homeless Indian man who shared food with us, both what we’d brought and what he was cooking on a camp stove. He also offered to let us sleep in the shack he’d built (not completely homeless, come to think of it) and was generally very friendly and hospitable.