In my head there are places that I have been many times, that are familiar to me unto the last inch, but that have never existed anywhere other than my mind. These place-dreams started when I was very young, initially just a house in which there were many secret rooms and passageways. Some of the rooms in the house are familiar - slightly modified versions of my cousin's living room, or the sun room of the house I grew up in - but some are completely foreign, with extravagant beds and couches, tables and ferns and sometimes even rock walls and beautiful skies.
Later in my life another recurring space happened in my dreams, and me being a little bit older I actually remember the circumstances and setting of my life at that point, though I'm not sure it is important. I went away to a summer camp in Washington focused on teaching kids a thing or two about programming video games. One night in the hotel with the early morning sun streaming in on my face I dreamt I was in a tropical themed bar at a fancy hotel. Perhaps influenced by my staying in a place away from home, the hotel in Seattle was built much more like New York than a tropical getaway. These dream spaces often don't even involve any characters other than myself, and if any appear they tend to remain background, as if just installments in the open space.
The most recent dream is also more commonly populated with interactive personas than the earlier dreams. It is on a beach, on a circular outcropping at the end of a peninsula. Sometimes the dream involves me getting there, usually in a car with other people driving around the paved ring of a road but always pulling up to the same neighborhood if not starting there initially. Here the houses stand enormous against the dark skies, with side yards and huge glass windows and immaculate gardens. The whole neighborhood is still and quiet except for a constant, cool, rustling ocean wind that pushes the palm fronds against the sides of buildings clacking the sound of skeletal footsteps into the night air.
We walk. Past the many roomed house of my dreams, with its impossible construction. Where a room with two doorways can lead to eight different rooms, where the top floor is only a cleverly disguised attempt to veil the bottom floor still above you. Through the side yard down a patch of neatly trimmed grass and through a wood slab of a door. Just a slight ledge from the garden gate to the cement stairs with the railing leading down, and breaking only once it hits the sand. We don't take those stairs all the way down though, the current they follow doesn't hold sway over us - and this is the interesting part, because in the catalogue of my mind this is the thumbnail of the entire voyage - instead we duck the rails onto a stony outcropping that looks out over our entire side of the beach. The rock politely forms a trail from one end of the beach to the other, always at an incredible vantage with a broad view of more ocean than I previously thought imaginable. From here we walk, and often in circles, and only sometimes back to the house. And here I wake up.
And here, I remember.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Put It Somewhere Useful
Now having graduated and with only gradual motion into the real world I find only that I am tired. A deep sleep extends through my being as if the waking portion of my life has already been spent and here I enter a sweet, calm hibernation. My senses are dulled by anxiety, my palms sweat out all my future ambition into puddles of timidity and habit. We howl at the door in anticipation of the evil world outside, knowing it is not trying to get in but just as terrified of ourselves going out, running in the grass, absorbing the lurid sunshine of the late afternoon. A moth clings to the blinds like a reminder of the night, it rests with wings folded hiding in its own shadow, ready to chase a light in the dark but not even slightly bemused by the permeation of sunshine; at rest. At rest in the day of life. But if the day petrifies me, then where can I find my own light in the darkness? I need something to chase in this dominated space.
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