Dream geography

For many years I had a recurring dream about being in an immensely high and narrow building, little more than a lift shaft really, with small rooms off it. Apparently it was where I worked, and I was very anxious about being able to operate the lift successfully. Being trapped was an ever present fear. Since September 2001 I have never had this dream, but then during this time I haven’t worked in the building that I thought the dream imagery represented. It never occurred to me at the time that the location might have been New York; that realisation only came retrospectively.

I have other New York dreams, though, one of which starts by the Hudson, at an elevated station near where the twin towers used to stand, and proceeds round the waterfront, Battery Park I suppose, but then mysteriously seems to transform into the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon. Another dream takes me on the Subway to Smith and Carroll, high above Brooklyn, and close to a junk-filled Gowanus Canal. A dream of upper Manhattan is full of brown warehouses; on Central Park West I sob bottomlessly for my favourite Beatle. None of this is very satisfactory. Presented thus it sounds daft and mildly pretentious.

Why, I wonder, do I dream like this? My knowledge of New York isn’t bad; my waking state mental maps of the city likewise. Why does my dreaming brain need to distort geography in this way, and consistently so? Does it tell us anything about the hidden similarities or patterns between places, about suppressed analogies or repressed desires? What is the point of it? Why do I dream that I’ve been to Brazil, on a journey home from the US, when I know full well that I haven’t? Why, in my repetitive dream of Sydney, is the Bridge to the south-east of the city centre rather than the north-west, as in real life? Rearranged thus it doesn’t make for a better city. Could it be that my sleeping cerebral hemispheres fail to compensate for the southern terrestrial hemisphere?

Perhaps a psychologist could help. Would Freud have anything to say, for instance, were he still in business? I’ve nothing against him, although I’m not a huge fan - not that I would, as it were, want to indulge in a Viennetta with (or against) him. Wouldn’t want to slip up or anything. However, I rather fear he might have suspicions about an occasional Liverpool dream of mine which features a building labelled Herman’s Laundry. To make matters worse, it stands right next to the Overhead – which isn’t there any more. Or about my dreamtime obsession with underground stations – suitably matching my daytime obsession with underground stations. Birmingham New Street as a two platformed affair, rather like Baker Street Circle Line station, murky and steam powered. Oh, how I wish it was. Or Holborn as an ecstatic subterranean maze with escalators oozing counter-intuitively out of small holes in the sides of cavernous passages, rather like on the Jubilee Line extension. Then the old escalator thing of being sucked into the mechanism, too amusingly clichéd to be a nightmare. Bliss.

My dream London is very strange, it has to be said, and surprisingly disappointing. Perhaps I spend too many waking hours contemplating the city and thus use up all the best material for things to be otherwise. Mostly the dream version consists of a wide strip of paving slabs in front of the National Gallery. Off to the left (not the right, as it should be) goes Charing Cross Road, beyond which, to the left, is Soho, coloured Prussian Blue (it’s always dawn), and consisting of an enormous hole centred on Berwick Street. (Sometimes, Sigmund, even in Soho, a hole is just an excavation for Crossrail). Long and vague and hugely uninteresting grey roads head northwards – think Goswell Road or City Road in the wrong place – towards mainline stations, just as likely to be Nord, Est or St Lazare as the terrible terminal triplets of Euston Road. Dream Paris, by the way, consists mostly of an open air market with a large slightly sloping empty space in front of it with a really good bookshop in the south-east corner, while the Channel Tunnel reaches all the way from Calais back to London. Which, in a sense, I suppose, it does.

 
In the waking state it’s hard to recall much of the detail, or of further dream-geographic instances, of which I suspect there are many, but once asleep it’s all able to reappear and to connect together. By which time, of course, I’m in no immediate fit state to report back in order to blog. How splendid, though, that this systematic parallel world exists within me, within my mind, a mostly unsuspected but wonderfully wonky information space that tugs at my creative urges and inflames my wanderlust whilst I snore. Well done Chief Designer !