The Dream-City

For years I have been haunted by a city that appears in my dreams. This isn't a recurring dream, but rather a motif that appears in countless dreams. I can't remember when I first began to dream of this city, but somewhere in my adolescence, I became aware enough to recognize this city as such.

Perhaps I am dreaming of one place, perhaps of many. I don't think that distinction applies here. As far as I can tell, it is a boundless urban space, extending as far as I can see, lacking clear divisions or boundaries, infinitely entangled and complex. Yet I can pull out distinct landmarks in this city: an antique rooftop water tower, a warehouse filled with cardboard boxes, a sludge-choked canal, a hotel with long verandas and bougainvilleas wrapped around high trellises. I can't remember how many times I've seen them. All I know is that I have encountered them, and they have permanently embedded themselves within my dream-city. Our waking world shows a remarkable similarity. We may have a memory of a specific house without knowing where it is or the conditions under which we saw it. All we know is that we saw it somewhere.

If we experience our dreams as the conscious mind sorting out all the empirical stuff that we process in our lives, then it stands to reason that this dream-city is composed of elements of the places I've visited and of my visual and auditory memories of those places. Certainly, individual buildings and patterns are borrowed from my everyday life. From an early memory of Kansas City, I recognize a looming pair of candy-striped smokestacks. From Seattle, there is a darkened bar with red candles at every table and a waitress with a tattoo of three black geometric symbols gracing a pale wrist. This city agglomerates my memories, my anxieties, my flawed perceptions, and my logical deductions, recombining them into a seamless nowhere and everywhere.

The dream-city is filled with names and places that correspond to real names and places in the real world. They seemingly lack meaning; they are places I have been, places I've never been, places I've seen in photos, places I've read about, imaginary places in novels and fairy tales, places I only know of as reference points on maps. These names correspond to an entirely mental geography. This city is Nairobi, Oregon, located in the heart of Germany, anchored by the bristling minarets of the Bosphorus and girded by the Danube which empties into the Indian Ocean, which is just outside the city-- you arrive from that seashore via the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, disembarking at the Finland Station.

A high percentage of the qualities and images seem to derive from early childhood. I grew up in a locale going through its growing pains, too small to be considered a city-- an overgrown prairie town, just big enough to have a tiny shopping mall. As the mall attracted business, the old Main Street had languished. What was left were antique stores, biker bars, shoe stores that had whole sections for diabetic footwear. Above the shops, the second floors of the old brick frontages had apartments, offices, and small, secondary retail outlets. As my parents shopped, I would run around the stores and behind the stores, looking at the patterns in floors covered in little hexagonal tiles and ceilings gridded with identical pressed-tin panels. Behind, in the dusty brick alleys, were steaming grates, crushed wooden pallets, and bags of hair from the barbershops and beauty parlors. These forgotten labyrinths still come back to me in daydreams, and in my sleep, they seem to overtake all other reality.

My happiest dreams and my nightmares seem to be embedded within this maze of reconstituted memory. This infinite space is a reservoir of dramas of a magnitude I have never experienced. I've fallen in love with utter strangers, I've thrown myself off a narrow bridge. It is almost like this is a laboratory of experiences and emotions, and I am the white rat, unsure of its purpose.

As I awake, the shape of the city remains for a second, appearing almost as a weakly tinted transparency held between my eyes and the world around me. Its light and its shadows linger around the edges of my eyelids. But I am finally in the unequivocal here and now. The city is sliding from view. By the time I step in the shower, it is a few images and a remnant of whatever emotions I was feeling. By the time I'm on the bus to work, it is a fainter version of that perception. And by the time I'm pouring my second cup of coffee, mid-morning, I can only remember concrete narratives and images that I have chosen to remember, that I have repeated to myself, that I have written down. It is at this point where the conscious mind has seemingly conquered the unconscious, and enforced logical and real patterns onto a remembered unreality. I have a snapshot: an empty hallway, a radio antenna. It is all I have, and I won't have it for long.