Dream Log: Lost on Sunday

I dreamed that I and some friends were in a car together, and we pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church in an area somewhere on the border between suburban and rural. Mass was about to begin. The others went inside, and I decided to take a walk until Mass was over. 

There was a tall, steep hill near the church, and I climbed it. The hilltop was very broad and flat. Even though I was in church clothes, I felt like running. After I had been jogging along for a while, a man zoomed past me, wearing the Chariots of Fire running outfit: white T-shirt tucked into white shorts, white socks, black shoes. 

I took the difference between his speed and mine as a challenge, and sped up. He soon disappeared around a bend and I never saw him again, but I enjoyed running fast. For a while I was self-conscious because I was running in a dark red shirt under a dark red sweater, dark red corduroy pants, white socks and black shoes, but then I told myself to worry less about what people thought and enjoy myself.

I ran so far that when I stopped I didn't know where I was, and couldn't find my way back to the church where my friends were. The area had become much more urban. 

I walked through a plaza lined with Renaissance-style apartment buildings which, I felt sure, many connoisseurs would disparage as absurdly gaudy and over-the-top. But then I told myself that I didn't have to let some hypothetical snobs stop me from enjoying the view. 

And the dream went on like that for quite a while: I walked through many different architectural styles which I liked although, somehow, I was sure that there were many experts who would laugh at them, and over and over, I was able to overcome my self-consciousness and like what I like. None of it was Sylvester Stallone's sort of thing. I don't like architecture that's THAT gaudy. (And there's no reason that Sylvester Stallone should be upset about that.) One of the buildings was a mall which included a shop whose wares included some of those old books which are as tall and wide as a man, which often appear in my dreams, or, more likely, new replicas of those old books.

Architects' Offices

Architects always have the most beautiful offices, with the most spectacular views. At least, my experience has always, without exception, been so. The question: "Who has the best office in this city?" is equal to the question: "Which of the architects in this city has the best office?"

Mayors' offices and governors' offices are nice, but architects' offices are simply in a different league. Even the offices of architects who aren't particularly good. Perhaps they all share the ambition to get ONE thing right; and some of them, after securing the right office space with the right views and fixing the place up correctly, simply don't have any energy left over for things like designing spaces for other people. I can understand that.

And seen that way, there are really no architects who are failures. Because: what could be more important than the space in which one works? Possibly the space in which one lives away from work. But if you work for most of your waking hours, and do little at home besides sleep?

And nothing has ever made me imagine wanting to spend a lot of time at work more than architects' offices. ("Honey, I --" "No time to talk, work work work, love ya bye!") And then off to the office, where you do great things, if you're a great architect, or just put your feet up and have a great life, if you're not.

Dream Log: FB Meet-Up in the Mountains

Last night I dreamed I was meeting face-to-face for the first time with some Facebook friends: mostly friendly, non-judgmental, leftist, pro-science Christians.

Our meeting place was in a mountainous region. We parked in a lot surrounded by shops selling things like candy and tourist-y knickknacks. From there we had to keep going up on foot, up a very steep slope. We had the choice of climbing the mountain slope itself, or taking some stairs which were enclosed in sort sort of white plastic. I started to climb these stairs, but as they went higher the white plastic enclosure got closer, and very soon I became claustrophobic and climbed back down.

Then I noticed that there was another set of stairs. These were in a very spacious and sturdily-built stairwell of the kind one sees in fine early-20th-century public buildings in large US cities.

In the dream, the stairs were not entirely enclosed from the elements. It was very cold, there was snow on the ground, I had left my winter coat in my car, and after I had climbed a great distance, I realized that I should not have. As I climbed the stairs back down, I reflected that all of this physical exercise was good for me.

At the top of the stairs, we made various remarks about how this or that person was either just like this or that one had pictured him or her, or entirely different. After that sort of talk had died down, there was a lull in the conversation which seemed like it might last, but soon several lively conversations were going on on a variety of topics. I ended up talking about the stairwell with a young married couple. The young husband (there was a husband and a wife in this couple, in the traditional manner) went on for a while about the stairwell and the turn-of-the-20th-century American public architecture which it represented. In the dream, he seemed to be making many profound points, but now, awake, I can't remember any of them.

I mentioned that none of what he had said explained why this stairwell was semi-exposed to the elements, while most stairwells of its kind were fully enclosed within buildings. I hadn't meant to upset him with this remark, but it seemed I had greatly upset him. He turned away and didn't seem to want to talk any more. Then I woke up.

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.

Dream Log: Old Friends, Large Building

Often I dream I am in buildings which are unrealistically large,

and last night was no exception: I was in a university dormitory whose ground plan was a snake made of right angles, and it was about half a mile long and 40 stories high. This building was a bit more luxurious than the utilitarian rust Belt public structures which often occupy my thoughts and inhabit my dreams more than any other building type. It's the only dorm I can recall seeing, in real life or in a dream, which had communal lounges on other than the ground floor. Some old friends and I were in one of these lounges about 20 stories up. One wall of this lounge was the building's exterior wall, all glass, solid-looking and very clean. The floor was un-scuffed. The furniture was several cuts above 1950's airport.



These friends were a group of women I haven't seen in 25 years. One of them was holding a puppy which was hairless and embryonic-looking and too small, as if it were actually something like a baby squirrel. I asked if I could hold it, and as soon as my friend passed it to me, it was much larger, an actual small-breed puppy with fur.

I was mostly interested in attempting to charm these charming women, just as I had been 25 years ago, but another friend, a man, wanted me to join him in another part of the lounge, and I felt that politeness left me no choice but to go and see what he wanted. It's not as if he was particularly annoying or unpleasant. In the other part of the lounge where he was, there was a TV with a very large screen, and he wanted my help choosing a DVD to watch. I recommended a video about Vatican City I've seen on the AWE network, made for the UNESCO World Heritage Center with assistance from Sony, not a bad video in my opinion, with good cinematography and interesting music.

It turned out that this video had footage which was not included in the hour-long program on AWE. In fact, the two of us watched for quite a while before I woke up, and during that long while I didn't notice a single shot which was included in AWE's version.