In my dream last night, it was the year 2020, I was my real age, my Mom was still alive and COVID didn't exist. Mom was driving, I was riding shotgun, and we were driving at night through an area of downtown Detroit filled with huge buildings which had been breweries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but which had been abandoned for some time more recently. The city government had begun a program to reclaim these brewery buildings, putting new homes and businesses into them. I told Mom I thought this was a great idea, and I thought that these buildings looked very solid and that they would provide great "shells" for the new development.
In real life, although I know of a few "Brewery Districts" in which old brewery buildings have been re-purposed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I have no idea whether brewery buildings are inherently superior to any other buildings in any structural way.
I would not be able to look at any large old abandoned buildings and be able to tell you much of anything about them. And I do not happen to know anything at all about any breweries, past or present, anywhere near Detroit.
Mom seemed skeptical about this renewal project -- and in real life she knew far more about construction and renovation than I do -- but I told her that it had already begun, and pointed out some new renovation here and there: a hotel, a micro-brewery, some apartments among the windowless wreckage.
Our destination was on the other side of the brewery district: less built-up, mostly residential, home to many Swedish-Americans whose ancestors had immigrated in the 19th century, many of whom could still speak Swedish as well as English, and often could read and write it, too. A second-hand bookstore in this neighborhood was reputed to have a copy of a Swedish Bible which was interesting to me for some reason not explained in the dream. It was a small store. A woman about my age owned it and seem to be the only employee.
Mom said she had to go. I said I'd be fine, there was a bus stop nearby.
The bookstore owner had been waiting for me, and she happily handed me two books about the Bible I was looking for. It turned out that she didn't have a copy of this Swedish edition of the Bible itself. She showed me some other books she thought might interest me, but it was clear that she wasn't on my wavelength when it came to books. For example, she showed me a copy of a Swedish translation of Nietzsche's Götzen-Dämmerung. A very large proportion of her inventory seemed to be modern non-Swedish items translated into Swedish. To me, a real scholar is someone who avoids translations whenever he or she is able to read the original language, except for very rare exceptions when a translation has some intrinsic interest, as did the Swedish Bible did, which this bookstore didn't have.
Then the dream changed completely, and I was inside a virtual-reality discussion group where participants were able to print out messages telepathically. An image of the sender's face came automatically with each message, on virtual objects reminiscent of those in broadcasts of American football which come onscreen showing a player's face and some information about the player. The participants seemed to be mostly Swedish-American, to judge from their names and the fact that most of them were blonde. Everyone was talking about the changes to the Brewery District. Then I woke up.
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