Two Neighborhood Dreams

Right now I am listening to my newfound discovery and life-long goal (as far as being able to play music), which is Beethoven's "Eroica" Variations, which I assume are variations on his 3rd Symphony, also entitled "Eroica," and initially dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, that is, before Napoleon came to a position of power. Upon hearing this news from a close friend, Beethoven viciously erased Bonaparte's name from the front of the score, declaring that "he, too, is but a mortal man," or something along those lines. In any case, I'm listening to a Glenn Gould interpretation (who else would one listen to?), and it is this part of my random start-of-post anecdote which directly relates back to one of the two dreams that I have had this past week involving my dad's neighborhood.
The first dream was a very cute one. In the dream, my mother, my cousins, my uncle, and I were lounging in the living room of my father's house (he wasn't there at the time). It was around 3:00 in the afternoon, slightly overcast outside; we were trying to think of something to do, when we heard a commotion just outside the house. I strode over to the window beside the front door, and peering out of it, I could see a crowd mostly consisting of small children and their parents congregating out in front of the stone house next door. They were all approaching the front door of the house cautiously but excitedly; parents were restraining their kids from running full-on up to the stone steps. I still could not see the source of their excitement, and so I stepped out onto the porch without my shoes on. Turning to the left to face the porch of that house, I beheld a giraffe. Given that it was a rather small giraffe, its neck still managed to tower about ten feet above the crowd it was so adored by. One by one, the children were led up to the animal by their parents, at which point this giraffe would lower its neck and allow each child to pet its brown-spotted skin. I rushed back inside, put on my shoes, told my family to do the same, and dashed back outside with intentions of petting the giraffe myself. I had never pet a giraffe before. Unfortunately for us, the giraffe chose this moment to depart, amid disappointed sighs from its devoted audience. In two strides, it managed to step over the crowd and reach the mercifully-empty street. It began a slow, thunderous journey toward Brunson Elementary; we watched it from the porch, and I woke up shortly thereafter.
The next dream was weird (well, not really any weirder than the giraffe dream). The setting was my neighborhood in the summertime, though I had an addition of two neighbors. In the stone house next door (which was the site of the giraffe in the previous dream) lived Emily Dickinson, the long-dead, reclusive poet. My favorite aspect about her was manifested in the dream - after a certain point in her life, when she was reluctant to leave her house, the most contact that she would make with society was the occasional lowering of a basket of cookies from an upper-floor window, for the children to eat. This happened shortly after I exited the house one day, and much like in the giraffe dream, all the little kids came running from the playground down the street to eat Ms. Dickinson's cookies. A few doors down lived Glenn Gould, a prolific (but also dead) pianist. In his life, he was not as reclusive as Emily Dickinson, but was known to be a very "eccentric" man, even beyond his piano mannerisms. In the dream, he spent most of his time in the house, and I would hear music drifting through his window when I took Lancelot (my dog) outside. My goal in the dream was to somehow find him when he exited the house and convince him to teach me free piano lessons. I never got a chance to do this, though I did eat one of Emily Dickinson's cookies, and they tasted like the sugar cookies at Harris Teeter (which I like a lot : )). Oh, and a fun fact for my avid readers: in the third grade, when we were assigned to dress up as some sort of historical figure for a 1st person autobiographical speech (about aforementioned historical figure), I dressed up as Emily Dickinson (in my white flower-girl dress; she apparently had an obsession with wedding attire, or so I remember from my project) and delivered a speech partially about her writing but mostly about her peculiarities. Two years later, we had a similar assignment, in which I dressed up in the likeness of Andy Warhol. So it goes.