Archive for category dreams

Date: September 16th, 2011
Cate: dreams, observations + conclusions + beliefs

the wonders I’ve seen

I had the happiest dream earlier this morning: I was wandering through the halls of my old highschool, looking for the door to the staff parking lot. I’d gleefully parked my car there, since I didn’t drive in highschool and thus had never had the chance to break the rules like that. The building was empty and cavernous, but brightly lit -- and there was the steady heartbeat-like thud of a bass drum from somewhere in the distance.

Eventually I turned a corner and the music got louder -- at the end of the hall, there was a loose crowd of people. As I approached, I recognized the song -- ‘Standing’, by VNV Nation. (skip ahead to 2:10 on the video to hear it.)

And as I got closer to the crowd of people, the music got louder, until I realized that there was a concert at the end of the hall. I started recognizing people as I approached -- my family, my friends, and we were all singing:

And fighting time, so much I ask, I will this moment last forever;
Though seasons change and things come to pass. remain inside of me.
And fighting time so hard I pray that this moment lasts forever.
And will the world stay standing still -- at least for me.

… I’ve thought about what I’d like to experience when I die, and I think I can safely add this one to that list. I like the idea of losing my grip on our world, and finding myself in a dark empty space, someplace familiar, but clearly a place to pass through on my way to somewhere more important -- and then to essentially ‘go towards the light,’ until I come to a place of warmth and comfort where I can stay forever. It’s entirely fantasy I have no reason to hope for, but still. It’d be such a relief.

Date: July 29th, 2011
Cate: dreams

temple waste

so I had this dream last night that I don’t remember a lot of details for, except for some important ones: in a nice post-apocalyptic landscape, I was with a group of like survivalist cultists or something, and we were basically devoted to keeping the human species alive. there were like mutants and zombies and alien things (possibly in a sort of Shade’s Childen setting) so we had to be careful not to get noticed – the idea seemed to be that we could deal with one or two aggressors, but a dozen or so would slaughter us. So we traveled a lot, creating these mud and clay ‘temples,’ which were like adobe shelter things. We covered them with shit, literally, like human waste and garbage, so that our scent wouldn’t carry. so there were definitly some scenes of me wading around ankle-deep in sewage, which was gross I guess, but not that bad – possibly because in my dream I couldn’t smell anything (actually, do I ever have a sense of smell when I dream? hmmm.) and that’s really the main disgusting part.

… that’s really all I remember, the setting and the circumstances, I don’t really think I did anything else other than set up one of these temples on the edge of an overgrown forest and wade through much and stuff. I don’t even think there was anyone familiar featured.

so yeah. that’s kind of an interesting idea. actually now I kind of want to read back through shade’s children again.

Date: July 11th, 2011
Cate: dreams

waste of a good ear

There’s been an accident at an all-boys boarding school: one kid runs up the hallway, fist clenched against the side of his head, while dark brown blood seeped between his fingers. He bursts into the bathroom, which is a long open hallway made of porcelain tile, partitioned into stalls by chest-height dividers. The first few stalls are already occupied, so he takes one about halfway down the row. He stands awkwardly high above the trough-style urinal toilet, unzipping in imitation of taking a piss, but slowly pulling his hand away from his ear.

The boys in the stalls around him can’t help but look, everything is open and he’s left behind a trail of red drips on the glassy white tiles. He deliberately tugs a bit and peels away the upper arch of his ear along with a blob of jellied blood. A small stream of fresher looking fluid trickles down his neck, splits across his shoulder and disappears beneath his collar. He looks at the detached wedge of skin and cartilage for a few seconds, then holds it out and lets it fall into the toilet water with a ‘plop.’ He glances around at the other boys, shrugs, and says, “Hey, it’s filtered,” defensively.

At the other end of the room, I’m taking a piss and trying not to be too obvious about watching what he’s doing – I glance down between my feet and see a pinkish stream flow across the toilet trough, then drain away on the other side of my stall. I don’t have to wait long; the boy’s detached ear bobs into view, having made its way to my end of the bathroom facility from where it was dropped. I stoop down and snatch it out of the water before it goes down the drain, holding it below the level of the stall partitions so no one else notices my macabre acquisition. It’s slippery and oily and rubbery, I run my finger along the inside of the ridge, then inspect it: dampness and a bit grit come off onto my fingertip.

Footsteps snap against the tiles, and everyone quickly straightens up and tries to look inconspicuous – the headmaster and disciplinarian saunters down the row of urinal stalls, stopping in front of the one occupied by the boy with only one-and-a-half ears. I don’t stick around to see what happens next.

fast forward to the future:

I’m hanging out with a group of strangers, playing a dungeons and dragons sort of game – but when we start playing, we’re warped into the game itself, and that’s not all; each player has a totem they take with them, something they’ll recognize from the real world, something that doesn’t belong in the fantasy world. My totem is, of course, half of an ear, that I picked back when I was a kid at school.

We press onward into the dungeon, a crumbling labyrinth of aqueducts and stoneworks, rusting chains and softened wooden catwalks. Skeletal remains of ghostly warriors inexplicably populate the murky hallways, and we fight our way through waves of undead until finally we reach the boss – it’s simply a bigger skeleton, much bigger, and with extra arms.

I don’t last long – he sweeps me aside with a giant spiked mace, and I crumpled against the wall, while the rest of my group struggles on.

… and that’s it.

So, this one has easily traceable origins: the kid with the sliced ear comes courtesy of Let Me In, the american remake of swiss vampire film Let The Right One In. The bathroom is just one of those places that’s kind of an architectural fixture in occasional dreams – I think that my concept of public bathrooms (particularly rows of urinals) is some sort of deep-seated childhood thing. Bathrooms in my dreams tend to be cavernous porcelain lined things with open facilities and this constant echoing sound of rushing water and muffled voices. Weird, huh? Anyway. The dungeons and dragons scenario with skeletal badguys is Fable III, and the totem is I N C E P T I O N obviously.

My somewhat morbid interest in my classmate’s severed ear is interesting, since it’s not really something I’d be likely to do in real life, but in the dream it was something I really wanted to do, I think mostly for the thrill of the forbidden nature of the thing.

Date: June 12th, 2011
Cate: dreams

get up before the monster gets you

It was hot outside, and I was thirsty. I was walking on a street I recognized, though I wasn’t sure where I could get something to drink – I noticed an auto shop with a couple of garages was nearby, I could see a middle-aged man inside working on something, so I dropped in to ask him where I could find a soda. He pointed me in a couple of directions, asked his two adult sons who were working nearby, and the consensus was there was nothing close.

I thanked them and turned to leave, but rather than exiting through the open garage door, I wandered off through an adjacent doorway, and found myself in another garage, this one dark and closed up – I heard them closing up shop behind me, and I started looking quickly for another way out, afraid of them suspecting that I was snooping around where I wasn’t supposed to be.

Then the first man, the father, came in, and told me not to worry about it – I could go out through the back way. He lead me back into a dirty concrete room with one door open to the street, and another odd half-height opening that came up to my waist. Curious, I poked my head out, and saw an enclosed alleyway, walled in with the backsides of buildings, roofed by the overcast sky.

“Can I leave this way?” I asked, curios about the strange configuration and the bulky tarp-draped vehicles at one end.

“No, you don’t want to go out that way,” he counseled me.

I got a bit of a chill, and prompted, “Why not?”

He looked at me, and said coldly, “it’s pretty fucked up.”

Well okay. I turned back, and the two sons offered to show me out – but for some reason, we weren’t leaving the building, we were going back in, then down through a trap door, through a service tunnel, and into what appeared to be an abandoned subway terminal. After running down a cramped stairwell, taking several stairs at a time, one rounded the last corner and hurled himself feet-first over the turnstile. The second mimicked the move, while I walked through normally after them.

“Know why we always do that?” One son asked me.

“For fun?”

The other shook his head humorlessly. “Not for fun. See that escalator behind us?”

I glanced back, and saw the last leg of the stairwell had actually been an escalator – albeit one that was currently unpowered and therefore stationary.

“We had a sister, you know, a while back – she was coming down here, just like we were,” the guy explained, “and some asshole was running through the wrong way, pushed her back into the escalator, then ran off – and she got caught in the bottom.”

“- so now,” the other one continued, “we always kick right through the place where someone’s head would be if they were coming through the wrong way, you know?”

“Uh, wow, yeah, I can see why you’d do that,” I admitted.

Leading me further on into the subway station, we ended up in a secret underground bunker sort of structure – and they led me to a back room, walls of cold concrete, with an ornate wooden frame, a high mattress, and white bedclothes. Lying there were what I immediately recognized as the remains of their sister: cold and bloodless, horrifically mangled, missing limbs and random chunks of flesh, stripes of torn skin running the length of what was left of her body in several places. The missing bits and pieces had been filled in with oddly cropped photographs that looked like animal parts – fur, claws, and a tail were all in evidence. Looking at what’s left of her face, she bears a striking resemblance to Star Wars-era Carrie Fischer.

I’m hit with the sudden realization of the path this story is taking… I envision a lightning bolt striking the body, magically melding its components, both grisly and photographic, into a shambling chimera of a zombie, wielding an unsettling array of  mismatched limbs… NOPE.JPG, says my brain, and I wake up before the dream turns into a full-blown nightmare.

Date: November 25th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: hardware store nightmare

shopping at some sort of hardware store with James, wandering around, trying to find one particular thing. we were also looking at possible Christmas presents for our family.

then once we found what were were looking for, we went up to the checkout area. suddenly things shifted a bit, and I was waiting in line with uncle Steve. I’d stripped off all my clothes at some point in the store, but was still carrying my pants slung over my shoulder. I was holding a bed sheet wrapped around myself.

So then I came up against a classic embaressing dream dilemna: I had to get my wallet out to pay the cashier, but I couldn’t do that and hold the sheet at the same time – everyone was going to catch a glimpse of me naked. I was fumbling to try anyway, when everything changed -

“Get down, get down, get down!” the bagger shouted, pointing at me – no, PAST me, I realized, as I spun around, and saw a decrepit old man slowly drawing a revolver with a long barrel out of the side pocket on his wheel chair.

“He’ll shoot you,” the guy continued, trying to warn the old man’s caretaker – the old man nonchalantly pulled the trigger, holding the gun off to one side, there was an explosion, and the bullet richocheted off the floor and out across the store.

We all backed away, shocked, and then I watched him slot in another bullet, then calmly point the gun at his caretaker and pull the trigger – then at the cashier, then the bagger, then me, then uncle steve. He shot at each of us, and we all fell – but he missed me. I curled up at the end of the checkout stand, out of sight for a moment, trying to play dead and at the same time fumble to pull out my phone and call 911…

I was half awake when those last shots were fired, the sound still echoing in my ears, and even though I already knew it was a dream, I still laid without breathing or moving for a few seconds before I could force my eyes open, to make sure that the blurry scene around me was really my darkened bedroom, and not the checkout line with the psychopathic old man.

Date: November 16th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: making the zombies real

It was a convention akin to PAX – my housemates and I had managed to get into the main event, where some company was poised to make some sort of fantastic announcement. Showing off, they peppered the seating with flatscreens that you could plug your laptop into and play with your friends while you were waiting.

We were making fun of one super nerd, skinny and small with long ratty brown hair, who was wearing what looked like bear pajamas, and saying everything stupid thing that came into his head loudly so that everyone else would hear. Me and Ryan speculated that he was the Molly Monster, reincarnated as a bear.

Finally, the presentation started – and my perspective sort of faded, picking back up after it was over, and we migrated out of the event hall. I caught something out of the corner of my eye, and, telling Andrew and Ryan to wait a few seconds. I ducked after a shady looking guy, and my suspicions were correct: he was selling a new kind of drug that basically enduced group-hypnosis and let you explore a fantasy world, accompanied by anyone else who had dosed at the same time. Naturally I wanted to try some – and we were headed back to wherever we were staying for the night anyway, so I bought 3.

Later, at the house, we had somehow brought the annoying nerd back (I think he was hitting on me,) and after we more-or-less drank him under the table (it didn’t take long before he was passed out on the couch) we excitedly cracked open the packaging on the drugs. Ryan suggested that we do them like cocaine – he demonstrated, popping his capsule open, pouring out about a tablespoon of chunky white flour-like powder, then leaning in and snorting it up one nostril.

“Whoa – it comes on fast,” he warned, as Andrew and I followed suit.

My vision was swimming, blurring and twisting, darkness bleeding in from around the edges, and we all sort of slumped forward onto the table to enjoy the experience. There was about 30 seconds where we were all paralyzed, blind and unable to move, except that we could still talk before the game started -

“Who’s that on the couch again?” Ryan asked.

“The new Molly Monster, remember?” I reminded him.

When I opened my eyes, I was lounging on the couch in a log cabin. Ryan was standing unsteadily against one wall, and Andrew was sprawled unconscious over a chair.

“Have you been up long?” I try to ask Ryan, but there’s a noticeable lag between my trying to speak, and the words actually coming out, so I end up sort of slurring the words.

Andrew fidgeted, then opened his eyes – and within a few minutes, we were all walking around, shaking off the effects of transitioning from the real world to this new one.

The rules of this new Dead Rising game were simple – you were given a safehouse, which contained a bunch of weapons to get you started, several exits, vending machines and/or stocked refrigerator, and furniture to nap in while you were recovering from outings. After three days, the several exits would become unsecured entrances, and you’d have to defend yourself against as many waves of enraged zombies as you could, using all the weapons and tools and allies you’d found from the surrounding territory up to that point – until finally you had to duck back into the saferoom, and end the game, getting points for each piece of ordinance, each rescued survivor, and each zombie kill.

I found the melee weapons stash on the back porch: lengths of pipe, aluminum baseball bats, complicated looking sword/cudgel things, night sticks (which Ryan decided to wield two of) and legit mace-and-chains, which I said I’d hold onto. Andrew found a glock and remarked that it looked like something that had been used in a movie we’d seen, so he would take that.

Afterwards, we had a few awkward moments where the game was still giving us time to explore our safehouse and the border of our property – the zombies were all at half-opacity, we couldn’t swing and hit them, and they weren’t aggressive. So we sat up on the roof, drinking out of the maltov cocktails we’d found – which turned out to be filled with brandy.

—

Analysis time!

  • PAX is a gaming convention in Seattle that Andrew and I have gone to for the past few years. It’s always been a big deal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it had fixed itself in my mind as the prototypical convention setting.
  • The nerd sounds like a variety of people we could’ve met at the real life PAX, or even people I knew from college or highschool.
  • The bear pajamas were identical to the bear suit that the main character wears in Serial Experiments Lain, the cyberpunk anime I’ve been watching lately.
  • The Molly Monster was a real guy that Ryan and I met at a halloween party – he’s now right up there with Karma Kurt on the list of ‘people we meet who are high on something and have alliterations for names.;
  • Also, we met Karma Kurt on a camping trip with another friend of ours, who used to pass out on our couch at parties, much in the same way that the bear-suited nerd did.
  • Dead Rising 2 is a real game, and the whole concept of your safehouse being unimpeachable, but only provisioned with basic supplies, the treasures being outside with the zombies there to stop you from getting to it… that’s the game, basically. I played a demo/preview version a month or so ago, and thought it was fun.
  • Speaking lag – we were playing a game after all. Also, my brother and I were voice-chatting while playing a game called League of Legends last night, which may have contributed.
  • The glock – I don’t remember what Walter Sobcheck wielded in The Big Lebowski, but we all understood that it was that character that Andrew was referring to – the character he’d dressed up as at one of our previous halloween parties.
  • Also, Ryan and Andrew and I have been known to get together and play Left 4 Dead 2, which is another multiplayer zombie video game, though very different from Dead Rising – we just played last week, in fact, while Andrew’s friend was visiting.
  • Oh, and the maltov cocktail brandy at the end was probably Metaxa, our house’s favorite brand of brandy, which I myself was enjoying a sip of before I went to bed.
… I think that’s all the stuff. Super interesting, right? I went to bed at like 2:30 AM, and woke up a few hours later – it’s so early in the morning, and I haven’t had enough sleep, but somehow this dream still woke me up. Crazy! I’m going to try to go back to sleep now – hair cuts and DMV visits need to happen tomorrow-today-whatever.
Date: August 21st, 2010
Cate: dreams
1 msg

alien attack dream

During the day, we were mostly safe – we were staying in a complex that I’d seen before, a sort of religious complex (probably based on first methodist in downtown pdx) that was like half school half convention center, with wings and rooms and stairways. The first night we weren’t sure what was happening because the incursion was small – the little bugs, of the flying and crawling variety, were on their own, with no zerglings or tentacles to back them up. Still, some people got swarmed, and we found out what happened when you got infected – you didn’t turn into one of them, you just rotted, dissolving from the inside out into a corrosive bio sludge, that settled down through the structure into the ground, and waited for nightfall before spawning a new wave of creatures.

So we eventually barricaded ourselves properly, sealing potential access points, killing the bugs that made it through – big skittering silverfish, and orange and red wasps, swinging lazily in the air as they zeroed in on anyone caught out in the open. The zerglings dashed around, never destructive, more like scouts, tapping experimentally on doors and barriers, windows and walls, looking for a weak spot. Of course, they were vicious too – someone was eviscerated, and we had to seal off that area, as it’d be where the bugs came from the next night.

During the day we ventured out to collect things, to try to find infected areas and expose them to sunlight, which ate away at the runny flesh of the creatures and turned them to ash. We tried to take time to enjoy ourselves, to get a little sleep even, but we were getting worn down – each night we had to ward off our attackers, and each day we had to recover from the attack.

Eventually, the tentacles found us – deep-rooted tubes of muscle burst up through the ground, spines snagging on nailed boards, ripping through cardboard and plastic. We made it out, somehow, and retreated to my mom and dad’s house. We tried to seal it off too, but we knew it would only be a matter of time before enough biomatter had accumulated to form another tentacle. I was in charge of sealing things – I wrapped the toilet in saran wrap, ducttaped cardboard and bags over the windows, plugged drains with rubber cement. We weren’t concerned about breathing – if the bugs got in, oxygen would be a moot point.

—

So that’s basically a combination of I Am Legend and the zombie attack mission in StarCraft2, which is cool – I don’t think it was ever particularly terrifying, but it definitely fits the alien/zombie horror sort of idea. A bit like Signs too in that regard. The Zerg influence is obvious, of course – maybe my subconscious is telling me to play more StarCraft?

Date: July 9th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: repairmen

I was doing some computer work for an asian family (vietnamese, maybe) just up on SE Foster where it splits off from Powell. They seemed nice enough, and considerate enough to stay out of my way while I worked. They lived in a trailer home type thing, a spacious one, but still just a line of rooms all the way to the back. I’d driven my broken down black jeep over to their place, and it’d died just as I reached their street – I managed to push it up next to their trailer before going in.

I wasn’t the only one doing some work for them – they’d hired a group of three other guys to fix some other mechanical and plumbing stuff in the back of the vehicle. I saw them as they walked past, and didn’t think much of it – until one of them started kicking the father guy. Just beating the shit out of him, knocked him to the ground, then kept going, standing above him and kicking him over and over.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, on my way over to help – but one of the guys, a big black guy (possibly the actor who played john coffee in that green mile movie) – stepped up to me and asked me what my problem was.

“What is this shit?” I tried to say, but he was already throwing punches at me, which I was trying to catch in my hands and push away, but I’m really no good at fighting, just good at being pretty dogged about staying concious despite pain.

But at least fighting with me distracted them from the family, who had three kids, a grandmother, and the father and mother, all living there. The kids were screaming, and despite everything, I managed to tackle the guy who turned towards them after saying he was going to make them shut up. I guess I passed out at some point, though, because when I woke up, I think I was at burger king or something, and mom was there. I couldn’t tell if it’d really happened or not – I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I ran back to the house, not really sure if I wanted it to have been real or not. My car wasn’t out front at the house – but I had woken up at a fastfood place not to far from where it all happened, so it couldn’t be fake, right? A dream within a dream?

There were police up the block, surrounding the smoldering remains of a burned down building – the parents were out front at their trailer, and the kids were up the street, playing foursquare in a park. I wandered over to join them.

“Did you know those other guys?” One of the kids asked me.

“Nope, I just happened to be there at the same time.” I said.

I was way better at foursquare than they expected.

… and that’s it. WEIRD! This was kind of a super immersive dream, pretty specific stuff happened, and it had that whole aspect of re-waking up and still being in the dream. maybe I was close to waking up AFK at the same time as I was blacking out in the dream?

Date: November 16th, 2009
Cate: dreams
1 msg

broke into the old apartment (dream)

It’s worth recognizing that Toby’s apartment and the HoytHouse are now each constant locations featured in my dreams (as The Apartment and The Hill House respectively) – that is, I have recurring dreams that take place in those environments. As with most of my dream locations, they’re only somewhat allegorically related to their real world counterparts.

In my dream last night, I’d already moved away from The Apartment. It’s a small, odly-laid-out space, the result of walling off some living area from the midst of the utilities and support infrastructure that take up the rest of the ground floor of the building. Above is a series of condos, which are accessible via stairwell and elevator – but if you walk past those in the lobby, and through a double doorway, you come to a long dingy hall. There are janitorial supplies and fuse boxes and various other things needed in the upkeep of the building… but there’s also a rickety stairway, built out of two-by-fours. It leads up to what could almost be the ‘one-and-a-halfth-floor’ – a dark collection of rooms that squeeze inbetween the air conditioning and plumbing and electrical lines and whatever else is up there.

And now I find myself in an interesting position – by merit of its relative obscurity, this little living space has become a secret hideout, a haunt, more or less. Technically, I’m squatting – I don’t pay any money for it anymore. When I lived there before, the landlord let me have it cheap, off the books, took money under the table for it – so when he died and a big real estate management company took over, no one really knew that I lived there. I mean, I’m sure people recognized me – I’d walked in alongside much richer looking people in the lobby plenty of times, giving them a friendly smile before walking off up the hall. I guess that they assumed I was part of the help, you know? And the actual ‘help’ probably either assumed the same thing, or didn’t even think to assume in the first place.

So my weird little apartment continued to open to my key, continued to power the refrigerator and the stove and the TV, continued to blow hot and cold air, but ceased to draw money from my account. Even though I now live at The Hill House, I still have The Apartment as a hidden hideaway. I was tempted to occasionally bring people there, but I wanted it to be my little secret. Only Ryan and Andrew, my current house mates, and Toby, my previous one, knew about it.

This was a lot of setup for the action of the dream, which featured three main parts. I headed downtown, parked in the building parking lot, and wandered in through the doors, expecting as usual that this time would be the time that they’d noticed, and that my key would no longer work. But it opened as easily as usual. I strolled through the lobby, around through the maintenance hall, up the stairs, and into The Apartment – I was planning to paint the stairs outside for some reason, in retrospect I’m not sure if it was smart, since keeping a low profile was what was keeping that space available to me. Anyway, I grabbed a drink out of the fridge, peeked out of the dingy curtains and watched the people walking by on the sidewalk (although the rooms were sort of on floor 1.5, as I said, somehow the windows came out at basement level on the sidewalk, so I could see people’s feet and shins as they walked past.)

I picked up the cans of paint I had left by the door, then went about my work, painting the steps bright red, the supporting beams blue, and adding white wherever I felt it was appropriate. Somehow in the midst of that I switched from the brush to just finger painting. And that’s when i came across the little stray cat that had hung around the building, and had occasionally followed me into the lobby and been let into my apartment before. It was dead, a little black cat, lying underneath the stairs. I wasn’t sure what to do… but I knew it needed to be buried, and there didn’t really seem to be any place appropriate around the outside of the building, since it was all urban highrises and stores and whatever – and there was no way I could get away with burying a dead cat in the grass on the sidewalk.

So I called up Andrew, and Matt Allen, both of whom agreed to come with me to my parents’ house  and bury the cat, although this necessitated letting the other Matt in on my secret abode.

… and that’s it. Here’s where I think all this came from. First off, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, and I went to bed early, then woke up for some reason around 5:30 – so I was still in the midst of dreaming when I started waking up. Earlier in the day I’d seen both Andrew and Ryan, naturally, and Andrew had mentioned talking to Toby and Seth, both of whom I lived with in the real life apartment downtown. Matt Allen was playing XBOX Live, I noticed, as Andrew and his brother were doing some multiplayer Borderlands action earlier. The cat… ah, my aunt and uncle had a cat that just died. My parents’ house is my parents’ house, I don’t think it needs much of an excuse to make an appearance, although it’s worth nothing that it appeared exactly the same as in real life, as far as I remember, probably because conceptually it’s been insurmountably anchored in my mind as looking that way ever since I was born. Not sure where the paint came from.

Date: October 12th, 2009
Cate: dreams

interior spaces dreams

I dreamt about some interesting stuff last night. I was with my dad and uncle, and we were looking for some old family records about something-or-other, and they suggested we look in the attic. At this point, I’m not sure if were in my house, or my parents’, or my uncle’s (which was originally the house that my dad and uncles grew up in) – but as soon as we went up a flight of stairs, we weren’t anywhere that I recognized.

There was a huge stairway – just like the one in my elementry school, a big quadruple-wide stairs that lead up to a landing, then two regular-sized staircases that lead up in the opposite direction along opposite walls, also terminating in a landing above the enterance to the room, which then turned and looked back over the way we’d come. Everything was framed in older-style windows with thing panes and painted hardware.

Then we left the stair room and went down an old creaky hallway – on each side there were other multipurpose rooms, lecture halls, a small gymnasium, a little dark smoky room where people were playing pool and poker, and finally a cafeteria, with a buffet-style serving area on one side. Off to one side of the lunch room there was a door, which lead to a tight little stairwell, heavily carpeted with big bulky ornamentation on the joints and frames, smelling of dust and old cleaning products, eventually terminating in a fragile-seeming wooden door to the attic.

Through the door was a great set of rooms – almost like an old conservatory, all white-washed and nearly entirely walled by windows. The ceilings were one big window, with so many panes running through it that it resembled secular stained-glass. Every wall had a bookcase against it, stuffed with books, papers, and boxes, cases and cases of reading material, writing, and stuck with odds and ends as bookends. There was a large table in the middle of the room, almost like a conference-hall desk, meant to be occupied by a dozen people discussing an issue, matte white paint flaking off the surface and legs. Towards the end of this room was an open doorway to another, this one featuring a sloped roof that came to a sort of rounded point at one end – there were also books stacked everywhere, a thin table and drawers at one end, and several overstuffed leather armchairs, also white, to match everything else. It was all white, and in the evening light, it looked like it was glowing.

I asked my dad and uncle if we’d ever owned this entire building (which I’d never seen in my life), and he said that his great-great-grandparents had once owned part of the area we’d passed through, but that the next generation had rented them out as appartments, and eventually sold them to a rich tenant, leaving us with what I was familiar with below, and this secret attic conservatory book stacks space.

 

Dreams like this are super easy for me to understand – I really love some aspects of architecture and interior design, and the surroundings in this dream reflect that. Old-style, grand, worn to the point of looking weathered and comfortable, full of memories. And the idea of finding secret rooms or features of buildings I can only assume is related to the concept of ‘secret’ or ‘bonus levels’ in video games – after all, I know how to get to Coin Heaven in the third level of Super Mario 3, why shouldn’t there be a secret staircase that leads out of the house I know and into an urban mansion that I’ve never seen before? The best part is – now that I know my way around source-engine mapping (for Counter Strike Source, Half-Life 2, Portal, etc) I could actually design a virtual version of these mental dreamspaces. Maybe that’d be a good project for today.

As for the ‘family records’ part of my dream, that’s another easy one – my dad has lately been really into researching and documenting family history, creating an unbelieveably extensive family tree at geni.com. I really only interact with my immediate family (e.g. my parents, and their families) on a regular basis, but I occasionally see bigger groups of relatives, and it’s sort of a neat and weird experience knowing that we all have this bloodline in common.

 

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