In Dreams...
Another in an occasional series of posts that contain no hypertext links.
I had a dream a couple months ago. Like most of my dreams it was nothing special. In the dream I simply live in a better apartment, It was on the strength of that singularity I think that I remembered it at all. It was better in that it was seemingly quirkier, fuller, more realized. What character points my current apartment has can be as well described as damage. It was also, I recognized, more like some other places I have emotional attachment to. In addition, it was on a hill, among other close buildings, and trees, with a modest partially obscured view of the sea, which lay beyond a layer of roads, a quarter to half mile away. It seemed in the dream, though I never specifically reflected on it that I was married. There, for that it was a complete sense of someone to share with, and the rule set of how to share with that person.
I should say something here about the defining characteristics of the landscapes in my dreams. It is generally the landscapes that define them. They are merged synthetic landscapes full of variant angles and end points. A mix of familiar and unfamiliar, completeness and incompleteness with what I can identify to produce something with no real reference. Middle school corridors mixed with elementary school points. A navy base, joined into a city known years apart. And there is always the vaguely disquieting experience of moving through this environment. Which; though, only affects and lingers with me on those occasion where I happen to remember a dream, which often carry impressions or echoed recollections of other occasions in the same places. In those moments I become partly aware of the method of construction used in these landscapes.They are composed of the first impressions I had of things and places that I later established context for and common familiarity with. And of those places encountered only briefly for which no real context was ever gained.
In the memory and architecture of these dreams, there is vast and pointless detail and extensively of scale. These dreams contain entire neighborhoods, cities, cross country trips for which I will install detail and dwell on the history of the detail. To what extent I can recall it now and give account for it, the levels of detail include the visual, tactile, and what regarde I have for these things. These environments rely heavily even exclusively on manmade built and urban environments. Even though I grew up in small towns and countryside. These are more streetscapes than landscapes. The extent of my conscious knowledge is limited to awareness of the surfaces and shapes of things. I only know what I see. I am only my eyes in these dreams, There is an opacity beyond this.
In life, particularly the modern western life we lead. Change and movement is the rule. Changing vistas, and changing situations. And yet through this churn, I know that many peoples lives have a certain 'there and back again' quality. Even among the people I know. We recreate the familiar wherever we go. We change little from who we are.  This is why a change of scenery can have such a profound effect on us. A quick, albeit temporary way of affecting a number of terms and cues all at once. For whatever meaning dreams contain, and I am not aware they have any intrinsic meaning, being mainly card sorting exercises for folding the days experience into memory. I am still tempted in the vivid imaging, the instinctive conceiving, of this particular dream to see another step along the road from Bologna to Rome.
10:23:28 PM  ;;
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