I had a dream the other night and the setting was the home and neighborhood where I grew up — chronologically, at least — but where I haven’t lived in 32 years.

The details of the dream started to dissipate, as they so often do, before I had even gotten out of bed.

I believe a skunk was involved but it’s possible I transposed the elements of one dream into another.

(I have been menaced by skunks in many dreams. I have no idea what Freud might make of this and am glad he’s not available to tell me.)

The places that figured prominently in this particular dream, however, remained vivid, and for the rest of the morning my mind’s eye would occasionally stray back to those once-familiar rooms and sidewalks and street views of the pleasant residential district in Stayton, about 15 miles southeast of Salem.

I lived in the house from 1972, when my parents had it built (my grandpa, Edd Jacoby, was the contractor) until the fall of 1988, when I went off to the University of Oregon. I spent my college summers in Baker, working for the Forest Service, so I never again lived in Stayton. My parents sold the house in 1992.

I wasn’t yet 2 when my family moved into the house on North Fern Avenue and so it is the only home I knew as a child.

At various times I claimed as my own three of its four bedrooms, although for many years I shared first one room, and then another, with my older brother, Michael.

It was in the bedroom at the southwest corner where, trying to outrun Michael in a race for a coveted toy — a rooster, as I recall — I tripped and dashed my head against an old-fashioned school desk (the kind with a folding wood top that weighs as much as a kitchen table).

This collision opened a bloody gash between my eyes that required several stitches to close and left a white scar that seems to lengthen as the years pass.

(This seems to me unfair, that the physical remnant of a wound should become more prominent even as its creation becomes increasingly fuzzy, but my features have never seemed to care a whit for what I think about them anyway.)

Our garage is where I climbed aboard my first real bicycle, a baby blue single-speed with a banana seat and a chain guard emblazoned with the slightly embarrassing, and curiously boastful, name “Big Deal.”

I pedaled that bike in endless circuits of the neighborhood, rolling west on Kathy Street, north to Shaff Road and south to Regis Street, over to Evergreen on the next block to the east or, if I was feeling especially adventurous, all the way to Douglas Avenue — familiar but, at a distance of two blocks, still different enough to seem a trifle disconcerting.

It’s hardly surprising, of course, that I remember the details of the place where I came of age. I’m sure everybody does — especially if, as I did, you lived in the same house for the whole span of those formative years.

And yet, having lived somewhere else for considerably more than half of my life, weeks pass during which I don’t spare a single thought for that house in Stayton, or for that neighborhood.

Which is why I find it passing strange that my subconscious, at irregular and utterly unpredictable intervals, chooses to take me back there while I’m deep within that mysterious mental cavern that is sleep.

The experience, in common with many dreams of places or people you don’t often think of while awake, is not altogether unpleasant.

I have awakened from these nocturnal meanderings in my old neighborhood feeling all but overwhelmed by nostalgia. And I mean that variety of nostalgia in which the past isn’t a discrete series of events, some of them embarrassing or otherwise painful, but rather a period defined by placidity and happiness, when Halloween always yields a bounty of candy but no midnight trip to kneel before the toilet, when each Christmas bestows the gift you most cherished that year, when every summer evening features root beer-flavored popsicles and there are no mosquitoes.

But at the same time I feel a queer sense of displacement.

This isn’t that gratifying relief of climbing out of sleep and realizing that whatever awful fate befell you during the dream wasn’t real.

What I mean is the sudden and unexpected intersection of the present and the distant past — the peculiar meeting of the man and the boy he once was.

He is familiar, that boy, but he’s also a stranger because although his life is of course my life it’s also true that too many years have passed, so much time that although I know it was me crashing into that desk and riding that bicycle and ripping the paper off those presents I can’t remember what it actually felt like to do any of those things, or a thousand other things.

This bothers me in a way I can’t quite explain.

It seems to me that if I can still dream of that place, then my memories of it should be more distinct — more, well, real.

I have many times over the past couple decades detoured to Stayton while I was visiting my parents, who moved first to Salem and, a few years ago, to Mill City.

I have driven past my old house. A few times I even walked the neighborhood.

This, of course, was a much more immersive experience than even the clearest dream. But it disoriented me in much the same way. I felt at once happy to consider my good fortune to have grown up in a stable, loving and supportive home where nothing too terrible ever happened, and yet saddened, nearly to the brink of tears, at the reality that those days, those experiences, can never be retrieved, are gone as completely as the blood I spilled in that bedroom.

(Although I suppose the forensic gurus, with their vials and test tubes, might yet be able to assemble a DNA profile.)

I hope, as all of us hope, to know, in my last hour, that I have lived a good life, been a good person.

But I can’t resist the temptation, sometimes when I’m dreaming and sometimes when I’m not, to wish that just one time more I might ride that bike on those same sidewalks, perhaps on an autumn evening with dusk coming on and the smell of woodsmoke in the air, and the soft crunch of maple leaves beneath my tires, heading home to a hot dinner.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.