Thursday, May 19, 2016

In Which I Dream up an Entire Architectural Neighborhood!

I frequently have what I call Architectural Dreams, where I dream up some fantastical building and spend my time running through it for reasons that make perfect sense when I'm asleep and do not make much sense at all when I'm awake. It's the building my subconscious creates and not the storyline that I treasure when I wake up.

Last night, I dreamt a whole neighborhood. Lots of crazy stuff happened on my way to this neighborhood (including a massive traffic jam comprised of millions of people pushing shopping carts full of empty plastic containers down a highway), but suddenly I am there, walking up a hill on a sidewalk, looking around me at the beautiful homes and perfectly manicured gardens along both sides of the street. Some of the trees, for instance, were amazing--shaped somewhat like vast weeping willows, whose branches defied gravity and were covered in flowers so white they hurt my eyes to look at.

As I walked up the hill, I came to a fairly unremarkable but very neatly kept blonde brick house, and an old man in a wheelchair sat outside in his driveway. He greeted me, and I said hello back. I noticed he had a short brick column standing alongside the entrance to his driveway, and as I looked at it, the front face became transparent and I could see into the hollow interior of the column. The interior was swathed in white muslin, and I saw a mother mouse and several tiny mouse babies playing on the floor.

"We have mice," said the man, and I thought I'd be funny and respond, "And do the neighbors have mice, too?" Somewhere in my dream recollection, I drummed up a dim vision of once having a mouse infestation in my house (true). I felt alarmed.

The man said, "I didn't want them in the house, so I made them a little house outside. And they have a way to get in and out if they want."

I looked again at the transparent face of the column and noticed that there was a hole near the bottom right corner. It was like a soft membrane, with a tube of the membrane material extending into the interior of the mouse house.

As I watched, several rats suddenly appeared inside the mouse house. They were huge--as big as cats. They wriggled their way through the membrane and out to the sidewalk. The mouse family followed them, and I watched them all waddle up the sidewalk in a line: three massive rats followed by four tiny mice.

I had an alarming thought about how these rats and mice were going to infest this entire beautiful neighborhood, and I started to say something about it to the man in the wheelchair, but then I noticed that several of his neighbors across the street were gathered outside on a very green lawn and were happily socializing. They all glanced over at the line of rats and mice wandering up the sidewalk, but they continued smiling and talking as if it were perfectly normal. I was completely baffled. Then I woke up.

Perhaps there is some deep symbological meaning to that dream, though I noticed that elements of the dream were lifted from things I had seen or thought about the previous day. I was far more disappointed that I woke up before I could explore more of that neighborhood. I rarely visit the same place twice in my dreams, so I'll just have to memorialize it now so I can remember and mull it over it later.

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