I Finally Remembered A Dream I Had

I finally remember a dream I had, I just forgot that I knew it. Actually it's a reoccurring dream and more of a feeling, really, than a dream. I wrote about it for a portion of my memoir in my creative non-fiction class.

I dream of Amsterdam recurrently, constantly. I can smell the sweet, buttery scents of the bakeries waft through the narrow, brick-lined streets. I can hear the canals softly flowing under bridges and lapping at the stone walls. I can see the little shops and cafe's merge into the same place on the horizon, far beyond my morning gaze. The picture is so vivid, so alive, so solid in its reality that it confuses me. How did we get here? I don't remember the flight. It was cold and raining, now its warm and sunny. I wake up with a longing that defies description, except I know my heart aches and I am short of breath. I feel strangely empty, displaced, so disappointed to be back to my ordinary life and world. The German word for this feeling is Femweh, which literally means “an ache for the distance.” Perhaps I long to go back to Amsterdam because it is the closest I've been to my ancestor's home in Luxembourg. Perhaps it's the very essence of the city, the feeling of the sublime that gives life to my ache to return.