Sort, Stack, Pile, Build: Dream Log, Plus: Nothing Brilliant to Say About Architecture

I had some dreams in which the action was mostly internal, inside my head: I was in various social situations in which I felt awkward because I was unsure whether I was the only one feeling any sexual tension. I was thinking about architecture (So far this post reminds me of Woody Allen's early prose), about becoming an architect, as I have at several points in the course of my waking life. But just as in real life, so too in the dream I was 53 years old, and I worried that that might be a little old to start taking courses in architecture with an eye toward becoming an architect.

Then I woke up, and at first I thought that, although perhaps I would in fact not actually become an architect myself in waking life, I was going to write a brilliant blog post about architecture, and I would look up some bios of architects who I thought had started on architecture after false starts in other careers, and maybe that would even make it seem as if 53 was not an outrageously old age to start becoming an architect. I also thought that I would look through a volume by Ernst Gombrich -- this volume, as a matter of fact --



-- in the hope that there were extensive passages on architecture in it which would fire my imagination and inspire my prose.

There are some references to architecture in that volume by Gombrich, but not nearly as much as I had hoped (In retrospect, I think that the design of the cover had subconsciously reminded me of architectural drawings.), and what was there did not have the desired inspirational effect. Not that I read anything there which was unsound or sub-par. It just didn't resemble what I had very vaguely imagined. Also, contrary to what I had thought, the famous architects whose bios I researched all either came from families of architects or wanted to be architects well before they were full-grown, or both.

Even worse, it seemed that I did not have anything brilliant at all to say about architecture. On the contrary, my thoughts on the subject were of the crudest, most rudimentary nature possible: sort, stack, pile, build. This and that printed diagram look like diagrams of buildings, because of the right angles. Ugh. This building has a stairway here, that part of that building is falling apart. It took me a while to become completely awake, as far as the dream-feeling that I had something important to say about architecture was concerned.