Dream Log: Frontier Cathedral

Last night I dreamed my brother and I were at a cathedral in Detroit. I've never been to a cathedral in the Detroit area, and I have no reason to assume that any of the real ones are similar or dissimilar to the one I dreamed about. This place felt very liberal, there was no unofficial dress code, there were a lot of books. 

My brother and I found a group of books having to do with a cathedral built in the 1660's in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I do not know for sure, but in real life, I suspect that if there are any buildings still standing in the Upper peninsula which were built as early as the 17th century, they are rather small. This cathedral in the Upper Peninsula was not a ragged frontier log cabin: it was a full-sized, finely sculpted stone cathedral full of stained glass and gold. And it was not a modern addition to a modest 17th-century beginning. No, it had been built full-sized and fully-luxurious on the frontier in the 1660's.

This frontier Cathedral was located in the town of Laclois. After waking, I found a Lac-Lois, Quebec, located several hundred miles from the Upper Peninsula. The cathedral town in my dream must have been a garbling of the name of Le Locle, a small town in Switzerland which has been the home of several prominent watchmaking companies.

In my dream, at first, I was skeptical about a church so large and so old existing in the Upper Peninsula, but the books, from recent back to 17th-century themselves, gradually convinced me that this was all real. I said to myself that perhaps the Quebecois -- all of Michigan was once Quebec -- built this huge structure to comfort themselves in the face of the huge scary frontier. Yes, it was an astounding feat of construction, but what cathedral that old or older was not?

Another unrealistic detail of this dream was that my brother either found all of this as fascinating as I did, or was pretending to, for my sake. The early drawings and paintings and more recent photographs of the huge cathedral, the texts, primary and secondary, in Latin and French -- he regarded them as eagerly as I did, and kept asking me to help him understand it all.

 

Before long a group of us -- my brother and I and several other people -- had decided to take a trip to the Upper Peninsula immediately, leaving that very day, to visit the huge beautiful cathedral.

I was trying to determine the status of these books -- was the church giving them away? selling them at thrift-store prices? were they part of a circulating library? or were they to stay where they were and not circulate? I had still had no success in determining this when I woke up.