The Dreaming City

Nothing is quite in focus. Nothing is quite the same as the last time I was here. But it is all familiar. It’s a strange place, one that I am aware of without being able to control. Somewhere, deep down, I know that if I take this street, just turn left here and walk for as long as it takes, I’ll find the house.

But I don’t turn. Not yet.

That place isn’t where I’m supposed to be. It’s not that I’m afraid of it, I just know, somehow, that if I find that house, walk through that door, it won’t take me to the place I think it will. That house will take me somewhere new, somewhere I don’t know, where I am not myself as I am, but rather myself as the dream demands I be.

Here, I am myself. After a fashion. I know my name, though I cannot say it. I know who and what I am, though it is as though that knowledge is apart from myself. A thing known, rather than lived.

Around me, the streets are blackish grey, the colour of cement as it rains. But no rain falls from the sky, turning my face away from the lighted windows reflected in puddles that are not there, I look into the infinite void over my head. There is the sensation of clouds, as though a cave ceiling hangs over the world, yet over my head there is only darkness.

No stars twinkle in the void. No constellations to point my way as feet I do not control carry me through the crowds that are at once there, and absent. Each face I pass is blurred, merely a suggestion of features without elaboration. Men and women, each one is both and neither. Empty as the starless sky overhead.

It is a place I know well, that dreaming city. The place between the strict confines of my subconscious hallucinations. Its paths are well trodden, though different every time I am there. Its buildings are each familiar, though always different from visit to visit.

Wandering through it, the collar of my coat pulled close against a wind that carries the memory of rain, I look for places to which I can assign an idea. So many times I’ve been down this road, wandered that alley, found my way from dream to dream. And yet I cannot claim to understand the place.

Time passes as I walk, one foot before the other. Turning my head from side to side, I watch as the people I pass step off the pavement and through doors which spring open before them. Through each I catch glimpses of lives I might have led, had I not fallen through the veil of waking to find myself in the city, rather than one of its myriad of hidden worlds.

Some are familiar, those buildings that I pass. A few show me visions of dreams I barely recall. A university mess hall in which I never stood in the waking world vanishes as a door swings shut behind a faceless figure who gained substance the instant they stepped over the threshold. She was blonde, standing about five foot seven, with the broad shoulders of a swimmer. I had not seen her in years, yet there she was, a laugh escaping her lips as she joined a group of familiar faces.

Just before the door closed behind her, she turned her smile around and focused on me. Blue eyes flashing in the late afternoon sunlight that filtered through the door onto the wet, rainless street. Then she and the dream to which she belonged gone, remembered only as a place I might have spent my night.

Ahead of me, another door opens. I stand on the other side, red uniform coat open with a coffee stain on the left breast. A dream from a previous lifetime, one I remember in vivid, though restricted, detail. The me I had once dreamed myself as being looks out at the me I am now, then passes through the door and is a shade. Faceless and half-formed. Returned to the potential from which he had originally sprung.

Every person in this city is a shade. Years ago, I figured that out, on a different lonely walk through the silent, dreaming city. Every one a dream of a person I had never met, or once had known. And through the doors of the buildings, a maddening collection of asynchronous constructions that blend perfectly together only in that place, they become something I can know. Take a shape and a form that my unconscious mind gives them.

Vaguely I wonder, just as the furthest extreme of thought, if there is something I can do. In this place I know that I am dreaming, know somewhat of the rules of that place, but have no control. My feet carry me on autopilot, bringing me towards something they think I must see. I am aware, though not afraid. There is no fear in the city, even when screams from within rattle the windows of a building I pass.

Fear is reserved for being within the walls of those places. A nightmare cannot escape its containment any more than can a pleasant fantasy. And both exist here in plenty.

Passing another building as I feel the end of my quest drawing nearer, I hear the sounds of a dream I’d like to have. The creaking of bedsprings and the words I always long to hear leak out under the door. That whoever is in there loves me, chooses me. Only in dreams.

Much as I would like to open that door, to give myself to that dream, my path is set. I am a toy train running on its tracks, unable to step from the rails set before me. Turning my head, I long to enter that place with the red light over its door, but all too soon it is out sight, lost in the haze of rain that is not falling.

Sometimes the city is dark as it is now, not terrible, rather, unknown. Other times it is bright, with an unseen sun shining down on the faceless masses that mill through its streets. On those nights I can no more feel the warmth of that sun than I can now feel the cold of the wind that sends my long coat rippling. I cannot bask in the dry heat any more than I can now turn my face to the infinite, starless sky and feel the ever present, ever absent rain on my skin.

I am aware of the rain, of its effects on the world around me as I walk. But cannot feel it as it falls. Cannot see it, only the illusion of its presence as the world is blurred and dark around me.

Through the masses of people, I can see the lights of the buildings stretch and melt as though the oil paint that made them ran down the canvas of my sleeping mind. On nights when the sun shines on the dreaming city, the buildings are clearer, and yet just as unknowable.

My feet carry me to the house. The one that is always the same inside and out, though when I am on either side of the door, I can never truly pass through it. This is the house of my mind; of that I am convinced. The modest dwelling with its peaked roofs and wrap around porch, the place that my paranoia says my life will eventually bring me to.

Within is concealed a dream I’ve dreamed for more years than I can remember. Always the same dream, always the same rooms and the same result. Not a terrible dream. Only consistent. Yet from the outside, I know that once I pass through the door, I will forget myself. The dream contained within has remained unchanged from my earliest memories of dreaming. But I cannot enter that dream from this side, I can only awaken within it.

Looking at that building, I send my thoughts down the path of remembering. That dream, I’m certain it has meaning, though I can never put my finger on it. On the why it repeats over and over across my years. I know that I will not have that particular dream tonight; it is not the kind of dream that I enter from without, rather it is one that I must find myself within before I know it.

A recurring dream, the only one aside from the city itself. In it, I walk through the door of a bedroom. I’m scared, though of what I don’t know, and I close the door gently. In the dream my parents are downstairs, only a shout away from coming to my aid, it’s a comforting thought. And yet I feel fear, a background terror of the unknown, and fear at that terror itself. The fear of not knowing, and yet being aware of the lack of knowledge.

But within that room that I enter, always the same room despite its lack of clarity, is the purpose of the dream. Or so I like to think. Ignoring everything in the room, I stride across it towards the large, ornamental fireplace and climb onto the shelf over the firebox itself. From there, I push aside a large mirror that holds no reflection and climb a set of stairs hidden behind it.

Summiting the steps, I find a hidden room. A place with a nest of blankets, a stack of books, and a collection of stuffed animals. In the dream I am always young. Always aware of my lack of knowledge and experience, yet unable to know why my head and memories feel so empty. I nestle into those blankets, stuffed toys and books surrounding me, and stare at the shadowy doorway down which the stairs run back to the bedroom I left.

Here is the only part where the dream changes. On occasion, I feel as though I am waiting on something with anticipation. On others, I am waiting in fear, certain that something is approaching me with ill intent. Still others again, have me cackling to myself as I play a game of hide and seek with an unseen, unknown, and friendly opponent. Most often, though, I simply stare at the shadows beyond the empty door frame, just past the first steps.

Waiting. I call it the waiting dream, or the hidden dream. The one where I sit among the soft trappings of a childhood nest and hide or wait. Though for what I am never entirely sure. Whether I’m hiding, in fear or in play, or if I’m simply waiting for events unknown, the dream is the same. The same events and the same sense of something missing. The very same emotions.

And upon the completion of every repetition of the waiting dream, I awake confused with only the knowledge that I have had the dream again. The very same as when I awake from the dreaming city, without having gone through any of its endless doors into the dreams that hide behind them. The sense of polite confusion at the dream that I have dreamed again and again, without ever knowing why.

On this night, I turn away from the house, however. Even though I know that I cannot enter the waiting dream by passing through the door of that place, I feel a longing to try. A deep desire to know what lies at the core of that dream, to know what it is I am waiting for when I am the child in his hidden room.

My feet are silent as I wander through the dreaming city, watching the faceless shades as they pass. Each of them is potential, they pass in and out of buildings without flow or rhythm and become something real to the sleeping mind. Bed springs creak from some buildings, laughter howls from others, screams escape the metal shutters of still others. Each one I pass, just the same as the shades, is potential. A dream I could be dreaming, a dream that my mind is processing even as I wander the rainless, yet soaked, dreaming city.

Each building a place I could spend the night, if only my feet would take me through their doors. But that is not my lot on this night. Instead I can only wander the endless, twisting, rain damp streets as a subtle sense of unease tingles at the back of my neck. I am not in danger, but something deep within me knows that I am not supposed to be there. The gentle paranoia one might feel if they saw behind the curtain at Disney World. The sensation that they were in a forbidden place, yet are in no danger.

Because I think that’s what the dreaming city is. The place between dreams. The place where the characters become shades, where imagination lives. The place where all that we dream comes from, and yet the place we are not meant to see.

Fin.

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Even though I’m going to put this in fiction, because it’s a dream that I’ve been having for almost two decades now, and dreams are by definition not real, I want to impress upon you that this is as faithful a narrative of these dreams as I can give. I have no idea what these dreams might mean, if they mean anything at all, but I’ve been having them both for as long as I can remember and thought it would be fun to share with you.

Do you have any recurring dreams? Have you ever been to the Dreaming City? Do let me know :)

All the best,

Alex