Some recurring dreams I have:
The City by the Sea
Like many of my other dreams, it is always dusk at the City by the Sea. The sky is always an impossibly deep blue and the orange light of the setting sun casts long shadows everywhere. It is almost completely made up Old Things—that is, everything is worn, rusted, faded, corroded, oxidized or to some degree falling apart, and the buildings, signs and people feel like relics from a vaguely bygone era. Most everything is made of dull, dark brick, and though the buildings are built incredibly close to one another none rise more than a dozen stories or so. The city sits on a very steep series of hills, but instead of following the contours of the land, the builders cut enormous terraces into the earth with elevated, buttressed roads that snake through each other like an MC Escher-designed wedding cake. Everything is brown or grey or green or rust. It is perpetually on the verge of winter, and everybody wears dark, long, heavy clothing as colorless as the city itself. It is important to note that while the city is huge, none of its components are—buildings are relatively small, roads are narrow and cramped and even the boats in the docks are all middling—it is the city itself that dwarfs everything. A wide road leads away from the city, away from its towering shadow, down a waterfront street lined with used car dealerships and half-empty strip malls and boarded-up casinos and once-luxurious condos now filled with squatters.
The Hotel
I used to dream about the Hotel much more frequently than I do now. In most of the dreams, I’m staying at the Hotel with a very large group—a student conference, my teammates, or quite frequently, a family reunion. We have a many rooms booked, spread throughout the hotel. It is always night, late night, though in my dreams I’m never tired or sleepy. With the exception of the lobby, which is incredibly, almost painfully bright, the hotel is consistently dark and underlit, pitted with broken bulbs or flickering fluorescent lights. Everything is heavily upholstered, carpeted and or covered in dark, wine-colored fabrics, and the air conditioning is turned down way too low for comfort, such that the overall effect is being in a somewhat fuzzy, cold-to-the-touch, dark series of corridors. We almost always have to entire floor to ourselves, even though we occupy less than a third of it. The rooms themselves are sparsely furnished with creaking, inadequate furniture covered in flaking paint, and some rooms are so completely decrepit—peeling wallpaper, moldy tile, stained carpet—we’re constantly swapping rooms, as the doors are not locked. The lobby of the Hotel, however, is an immaculate, cavernous place, a hyper-brutalist amalgam of soaring concrete curves and brilliantly polished chrome and glass. (I’m always vaguely aware that the city outside the Hotel must be some sort of futuristic utopia, and the one time I actually did dream about the world beyond, I stepped out into a blindingly sunny day, right after it had rained. I met a girl I had once dated, who took me by the hand and with an enigmatic smile said that she wanted to show me something. And then the dream ended.) In most dreams, I end up exploring the hotel with my brother and cousins, though frequently we have nowhere to go as all doors beyond our floor are locked. There’s always a constant sense of mystery but without dread—that is, we know that there is something wrong about all this, but whatever it might be, it does not involve personal danger. We frequently find a service elevator and access sub-levels that we are not supposed to, huge concrete hangars with giant yellow machines of unknown purpose. And then we end up trapped in the upper half of the hotel as the lobby is consumed by fire, blocking our only chance for escape. Yet the fire never spreads, and we retire to our rooms.
