![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dream architecture
May. 20th, 2006 05:22 pmMore so than overt symbols, I have always been really fascinated with the geography and architecture of my dreams. The geography is interesting because a lot of the times it is internally consistent, so I return to the same world in different dreams, but I only remember it while dreaming. Once I was flying across the night sky in a dream, and I saw a golden church kupola underneath me, and I remembered that I had passed this way in a dream a long time ago. Was it a "real" memory, in the sense that I really had had a dream like that, or was the memory a layer of that dream, contained to that night, that dreaming experience? Who knows. But that has happened often enough that my phenomenological experience of the geography of my dream world loops on itself behind my eyelids.
The architecture is even more interesting, because a frequent characteristic of my dreams is larger-than-life structures, and I mean swimming pools the size of inverted skyscrapers, or bridges across highways that reach all the way up to the sky. Standing next to skyscrapers in waking life does not imitate that experience, because we are used to skyscrapers being that size, as noumenons. The closest feeling in daylife I have had to that was standing underneath the giant redwoods in Northern California, because we are not used to trees being that size. I wish I could capture the proportions of this curious architecture, made for or by a larger species than me that apparently inhabits my dreamworld somewhere on the margins. On a tame night it might look something like this (forgive my poor Photoshopping skills).
But that's just normal houses. Churches and bridges tower over me when I am not flying over them. I might be three or four times smaller than I am in this instance. If I had a Freudian analyst with a pointy beard, he would have a field day with my inverted skyscrapers-swimming pools and apocalyptic bridges that seem to rustle: I've seen the future, Brother, it is Mordor.
The architecture is even more interesting, because a frequent characteristic of my dreams is larger-than-life structures, and I mean swimming pools the size of inverted skyscrapers, or bridges across highways that reach all the way up to the sky. Standing next to skyscrapers in waking life does not imitate that experience, because we are used to skyscrapers being that size, as noumenons. The closest feeling in daylife I have had to that was standing underneath the giant redwoods in Northern California, because we are not used to trees being that size. I wish I could capture the proportions of this curious architecture, made for or by a larger species than me that apparently inhabits my dreamworld somewhere on the margins. On a tame night it might look something like this (forgive my poor Photoshopping skills).
But that's just normal houses. Churches and bridges tower over me when I am not flying over them. I might be three or four times smaller than I am in this instance. If I had a Freudian analyst with a pointy beard, he would have a field day with my inverted skyscrapers-swimming pools and apocalyptic bridges that seem to rustle: I've seen the future, Brother, it is Mordor.
