The Recurring Architecture of My Dreams: Part 2 The Adult Years

So, those were my childhood dreams and the beginnings of fixed-place, lucid dreaming.

My adult recurring, lucid dreams occur in three locations:

The first is an overcrowded bus zipping along a narrow, forested mountain road somewhere in the Andes (where, for the record, I've never been). We're travelling fast on a downhill slope, mountain to the right, sheer drop off to the left when we fail to negotiate a sharp right turn and go sailing over the edge high above a city of jumbled low buildings with red tile roofs. I distinctly remember the first time this happened, part way through the fall thinking to myself, "No. I don't like this at all. Let's back up and try again," but couldn't and woke up just before impact. The second time, I did succeed in rewinding the scene a bit and became more successful at controlling the fall and the accident with each subsequent iteration. I haven't had this particular dream in years, now, and suspect it's because there's no more challenge left.

The second dream has no specific action but takes place in a large, dark, multi-story wood-frame house (at least it's all unpainted wood on the inside, I've never seen the outside. I assume it's in the Federal style) which is essentially a hollow cube with balconies on each floor running completely around an open, empty, atrium-like core. There are numerous wooden doors on each floor all the way around. I've only been in a few of them but, with one exception, they are all dark and empty with wooden floors and walls and, inevitably a secret panel behind the far wall opening on a warren of hidden passages allowing me to access almost any other room of the house without being seen (which is important for unknown reasons). The exception is a door that opens into a suite of bright, airy, cheery, sunny, interconnected rooms with numerous windows, comfortably furnished with tables and chairs, flowers and pictures, and suitable for entertaining company on a summer afternoon. No one, however, is ever there.

The third dream happens in a casino. This casino is set in a large open field surrounded by thick forest. There is a single road in through the woods which then circles the casino and leads to a large separate parking garage. The casino itself is ultra modern, three or four floors of polished wood and aluminum in the form of an oval, itself encased in a wider oval of glass in a steel frame. There's maybe a thirty foot space between the inner (wood) wall and the outer (glass) one. There are no windows or other openings in the wood casino walls except for the doors which I have never opened. I have neither been in nor seen the gaming floors. However, between the inner and outer walls there are a number of lounges, bars, restaurants, etc., reachable by escalators between floors. There are people here, unidentifiable background extras, but people nonetheless. They are all well-dressed. The only restaurant I have been in, unfortunately, is the buffet on the ground floor, where I waited in line for typical buffet fare and had a hard time finding a table. One time, I found what I thought was a restroom on the ground floor that turned out to have, in addition to a bewildering array of facilities, an extensive locker room, all arranged in a symmetrical array of dark, carved Gothic stone pillars, alcoves and passageways. And once, I started my journey to the casino from several miles away on a typical American highway, several lanes of fast traffic bordered by strings of neon-lit strip malls and "fast casual" chain restaurants. Night was coming on and the sky was purple with a bright orange sunset afterglow on the horizon. I turned left across traffic down a small lane into the woods and thence out to the casino which was bright against the dark sky and forest.

The reason these have all come back to mind recently, is that I may have started a fourth location, although it is still quite undefined in comparison. Twice now I've dreamt I was looking out a standard size window opening (there is no frame or glass) in a wall made either of concrete or stuccoed cinder block. Outside the window is a long, thin pole, much like a flag pole. I can see neither the top nor bottom. I can reach outside the window but not far enough to touch the pole. And climbing it is some sort of ghoul. This thing is almost human size. It's skin is made of dark gray leathery patches sewn together haphazardly, all except for its face which is pinkish-orange flesh sagging and folded as if melting. It has large eyes (can't recall a color) over which its eyelids droop. It has a long melty nose. The first time, I managed to reach out and push the beast back a bit, but in the second dream I missed and it crawled up out of sight.

All things considered, I'd rather hang out at the casino (or in the sun room).

The Recurring Architecture of My Dreams, Part I: The Early Years

I had a dream over the weekend and it has caused me to think about my history of dreams and some of their standard settings. This last one was some place new yet familiar.

I can remember dreams going back to my early childhood (five or six years old). The two earliest were non-repeating: the first has no setting just a dark background and involves a standard wooden school ruler, 12 inches long with flat bottom and slightly beveled top, fractional inch segments* imprinted in black and the small metal insert running the length against which you could run your pen or pencil to draw a perfect straight line. I hold the ruler in my right hand (I'm left-handed) while a pale green, luminescent spider about an inch long slowly crawls from the far end toward me. I watch as it passes each printed tick mark on the ruler, starting and stopping, glowing faintly as it closes and I can not let go no matter how hard I try until I wake just before it touches me.

The second one seems more. . . normal . . . for a five/six year old: The new suburban neighborhood in which we lived backed up to, and was named for, a long, forested ridge on the other side of which was a reservoir. On the crest of the ridge, one tree stood above all the others, a pine with a peculiar top which, if you squinted just right, or had very poor eyesight as I do and couldn't focus properly, looked an awful lot like a Tyrannosaur. Which, in my dream, it became and waved its tiny arms about and chomped its huge jaws but never came down into our little valley because it was still rooted up there.

Both of those dreams are over fifty years old and only happened once.

The first of my recurring dreams started shortly after. It was also the first of my lucid dreams. It was the flying dream.

I remember lying on my back, under the covers, yet not touching the bed. With a little effort I could swing my body sideways, left then right, until I was moving like a pendulum or someone swinging in a hammock. Soon I was flying two or three times a week. I still remember the delight I felt when I eventually realized I could control how far I could arc the swing and when I first performed a full barrel roll.

At some point, I turned over so I was facing down and thus began moving through space. Left, right forward and (with some difficulty) back were mine. The only thing I never got the hang of was altitude control and I remained at a constant (and not coincidental since that just happened to be the height of my bed) three feet off the ground. And this is where the first of the recurring locations came in as I found myself repeatedly navigating through my brightly lit, empty school, into and out of classrooms and up and down the clean, polished hallway, no one else around, until, inevitably, the one long hallway would narrow down in a kind of forced perspective and I found myself with shoulders wedged against the walls unable to move and woke up. The school setting was accurate down to the desk arrangements, lights and radiators in the classrooms, including the overall floor plan. As dream settings go, except for the last little bit, it was quite mundane.

A couple years later we moved to another town and those dreams ended,

* There was no such thing as metric in those days. I wear an onion on my belt.

My Diesel Madelaine

Sitting at a red light and a truck pulled up beside me.

Driving with windows down, as per usual, the fumes wafted over and I was instantly transported to Shaftesbury Avenue just off Picadilly Circus approaching the Chinese restaurant that offered glossy red sweet and sour pork from the second floor (or as they called it, the first floor) overlooking Leicester Square some 30 odd years ago. That was the aroma off the great red double-decker Routemaster buses of the '70s when I lived in Queen's Gate SW7.

There were around 40 of us, students and professors together, in a five story stone townhouse, with an English cook who believed devoutly in lard which she applied by the kilo and whose fried eggs never touched the pan but circulated in the oily currents until pronounced done leading us all to confine ourselves to Corn Flakes for breakfast; three maids, two Spanish and one cute Australian nicknamed "Rabbit" who went out with me a couple of times before she was sent away for fraternizing; and Mrs. Yardley, the housekeeper, who enjoyed the occasional sweet vermouth and had previously served for "Mr. Hitchkock" (yes, that Mr. Hitchkock) out in Essex during the war, where she saw one of the first V-1s impact in a field nearby as she rode her bicycle back from market, and whom, upon sufficient application of the aforesaid sweet vermouth, she described as "a very quiet man. Strange. But very quiet."

Our classes, at the Commonwealth Club, formerly the Empire Club, renamed in a fit of political correctness never accepted by its older members enjoying their cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and grumbling aloud just what the hell all these Americans were doing wandering around loose, were limited to three and a half days a week leaving the rest of the time for our own explorations, including excursions through Hyde Park on a bright fall day up to Speakers' Corner with a fellow student in a wheelchair and whose name I have forgotten to be regaled by political lunatics and religious fanatics, and trips to some little lane out near where the Crystal Palace used to be which was the location of three restaurants, all within sight of each other and all named some variation on the theme of "Pot." There were the Hot Pot, the Golden Pot and the Golden Hot Pot, the first being our favorite, not so much for the good, cheap food (although it was both, in an Italian theme) but for the waitress who came to our table of five without pad or pencil, proceeded to take our orders, served another table and returned with our meals, all correct, which she placed, also correctly, without once asking who got what. We were duly impressed.

The light changed and the truck drove off taking its diesel fumes with it. I came home.

It's different now. The last time I was in London the city seemed darker and grimier, although that may have been the effect of twilight and drizzle and early spring instead of bright high autumn. But the streets seemed even narrower, the buildings are taller, the Commonwealth Club is gone and Picadilly Circus isn't even a circus anymore, the formerly encircling streets having receded on the east side leaving Eros stuck out on a pedestrian peninsula. And we couldn't find the old house, although we may have been on the wrong side of the street. And the rent-a-Morgan dealership in the mews was long gone.

Still. I really want to go back again. Diesel hits just aren't enough.

Jello Brand Dreams

Had another vivid dream last night. I walked out of a building and into a sort of plaza next door, kind of narrow with another building on the right and a back wall. The whole place seemed to be enlosed although I don't recall seeing a ceiling or roof. There was a large stuffed leather couch along the left wall with another, indistinct couch or large piece of furniture beside it further back. The floor was large pink/tan tile. I was holding a decoratively carved block, a little more than a foot on each side and thinking how to turn it into office space when I suddenly realized I could stack large blocks on top of each other to make an office building consisting of one cubical office per floor with an elevator running up the side except I would need an outside fire escape on the other side of the building and that would be ugly since it would cover the entire wall.

Then Garrison Keillor started singing "Winter Wonderland" and I woke up.

No more dulce de leche pudding before bed.

Food for Dreaming

So...what sort of psychotic whacko has dreams about containers full of uranium hexaflouride gas? It was maybe a ten gallon plastic container, poorly wrapped for shipment in brown paper and packing tape. It wasn't mine--don't know who it belonged to--but I knew it would never make it in one piece, so I tore the wrappings off, in the process accidentally pushing a button that released a dose of the radioactive gas which I inhaled although I tried not to. Accepting that I might have taken in enough to cause lung cancer at some future point I, and someone I could not see who was in protective clothing, spent a lot of time and energy without much success trying to construct a container made of wood and plastic, much larger and sturdier than the wrapping paper someone had tried to use before.

Then I woke up.

My clock radio goes off at 6 and runs til 8 but I woke to silence having overslept both the BBC World News and an hour of Morning Edtion, I think because I was tossing and worrying all night long. Mom had another day of zero energy. They don't happen often (this was the third since I've been down here) but when they do it seems like she's ready to just give up. Usually, she not only eats right but insists on doing the cooking. These last couple of days she's only been interested in soup.

Last time this happened, I fixed some home-made sausage & peppers with a side of penne and a salad. I asked if she'd like a glass of wine to go with that and she said "Oh, that would be very nice," so we split a flinty little shiraz. She then asked if she could have seconds (of the entree not the wine) and I said "Of course." She then totally surprized me by accepting an offer of ice cream for dessert ("Well, if I'd known there was mint chocolate chip...").

I am amazed how many calories it takes to keep an old lady functioning.

This morning, before my (late) walk, I asked if she was feeling better and she said "Yes," but without a lot of enthusiasm. After I got home however, she chopped walnuts, mashed a banana and made banana bread, so I'm hoping things are better now for a while.

I'm going to take a nap before I eat my banana bread. In the meantime, if any of you heard a report this morning (Friday 2/5) on NPR (BBC or Morning Edition) about uranium hexaflouride, please let me know. I really hope that was just subliminal suggestion from the radio and not my own brain doing that.