The current theory about dreams is that they are the result of neurological processing -- at least when everything works the way it’s supposed to. If the brain can’t finish the job, it evidently wanders a labyrinth, trying to find the right place to store (I imagine a police evidence lock-up) or discard (I imagine a waste chute like a tall apartment building’s disposal out in the hall) impressions from the day. Since I usually watch movies in the evening and since they are usually mysteries, cop shows, procedurals -- which covers a lot of territory -- I dream images from them.
Contemporary movies of this type, especially the American and Scandinavian ones (I’ve become a big fan of several standout Danish actors: Mads Mikkelson, Thomas Gabrielson, Jens Albinus and others.) But also I am a fan of the cinematography and sets. Because these sorts of film are normally attached to cities there are fabulous helicopter shots of skyscrapers with their light patterns and finial tops.
Portland, Oregon
We look along the streets and, esp. in the Scandinavian and New York shots, see the sky over harbors, often at sunset or sunrise, sometimes with huge ships sliding along. The incredible wealth of a major city shows in the glass-doored luxury buildings while the dark underpinnings and infrastructures become night scenes of Bruegel-people in temporary cardboard villages and elevated trains make their terrible screams overhead when going around a corner, pushing walls of hot air ahead of them -- but those aren’t photographable, just dreamable.
The Scandinavians live indoors in winter but outdoors in summer, so there are always scenes in summer fields, small rough cabins or the kind of country houses the east coast of America used to call “cottages.” Americans scattered to the countryside before there was air-conditioning, but now the wealthy go to warm shores in winter. In the days when I was more likely to read magazines in the evening, I dreamt house interiors because most of the magazines were high end “shelter mags.” Now I’ve stopped, in part because I’d have to subscribe to have access, and anyway they’ve slid over to being celebrity mags -- the houses of the rich and famous -- and I don’t care about them. No one really lives in them anyway. Sometimes I’ll flip through the mags about “cottages” in the more modern sense: small old-fashioned buildings with clever recycled furnishings. But I never dream about them.
Nor do I dream about the American luxury bedrooms which always have acres of mattress and dun-colored bedding because human skin looks better against it. (Cinematographers hate white.) Print has disappeared again, but sometimes there are navy blue or espresso sheets. Headboards are interesting to watch. But bedrooms of the Great British Houses are still the most suggestive. Some of their coverlets look to be several hundred years old. I don’t dream about them.
It’s the rushing modern streets (not sheets) I dream of, because they connect with sense memories from the Nineties when I was working for the City of Portland and using my lunch hour to circle through Meier & Frank to Rich’s Cigar Store where I picked up any new mags -- stopping briefly to scan the bead stores -- then through the Galleria which was a restored atrium with an Asian import store at the top level and Mother Goose, the nearby luxury artisan object store where my cousins have worked; on around through Nordstrom where a three story escalator goes up alongside a wall of mirror while a grand piano tinkles away at the bottom, played by a young man in a tux; and finally through the new-built shopping atrium, Pioneer Place, where the escalators seem totally unsuspended or supported and it took me months to work up to enough vertigo tolerance to step onto them.
Pioneer Place
Just now online I looked for photos and found a few, but Portland -- maybe because of the rain -- is a books and cafés sort of place. What I know is the neighborhoods, the arteries and seedy parts that I drove as an animal control officer. I don’t dream about them much, but I do think about them as a waking, pondering, remembering person.
In dreams I wander downtown Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford and Oxford. (I've never been in that last.) Most of all I go back to academic settings -- not the pleasant campuses and bland buildings of Northwestern at the end of the Fifties when I was an undergrad -- but the indoors labyrinths and catacombs of stone quads, built like Gothic forts around a square of grass. (There are usually warnings to keep off the grass.) Some say quads are descended from religious cloisters. The effect of them -- since they can be closed off from the surroundings -- is to allow a protected environment even in a ghetto like the South Side of the Chicago. However, protection is only another word for confined.
Some say dreams are records of unfinished business and I suppose that’s true. Indeed there are loose ends in my ’78-’82 sojourn. The degrees were granted and all that. I’ve finished the possibilities of my professional arc as a Unitarian Universalist minister. So what is it that’s undone? Unsolved. Unresolved. It’s not about me, I think. It’s about institutions, whether housed by academic quads, commercial shopping atriums, or governmental office buildings.
Yesterday I watched a TED talk by Louis Kahn’s son. as he visited his father’s masterpiece: the capitol complex of Bangladesh, the poorest and most endangered of all nations. It is built on a flood plain, with workmen using bamboo scaffolds instead of steel, and concrete technology that my grandfather and his brothers used to create the concrete silos of dairy farms on the flood planes of Washington State at the beginning of the 1900‘s. But not even they carried the concrete to the top of the forms in baskets. Here’s the Kahn building: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMjWPoixRzA The man himself was ugly and rude, totally preoccupied with his work, hardly knew his children, but he created this very beautiful simple complex with huge vaults of space that inspire a people desperate for inspiration.
I love architects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK_gGQ91rmQ This is a short clip of Douglas Cardinal, Calgary-born architect who is well-known and much-admired in Canada. He is Blackfoot and Metis and has made it a point to claim his heritage. His basic geometry is not the quad but the serpentine curve and his material is more likely to be brick than steel. Some of his buildings are only a few hours’ drive from here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgR4d9p5dQ is a TED-like talk of Cardinal talking. He is five years older than me, but looks much younger. Not in a “suit” but in khakis and polo shirt, he stands before a screen that shows his work. Locals, even the Blackfeet, don’t know it. Cardinal says that his key is living in the questions instead of the answers.
This is how one gets to dreams: questioning. That’s what’s not finished, nor should it be, even in the square stone Gothic boxes of universities. And yet in the square-cornered sheet of paper lurks the organic. One only has to set it free. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJB7KzDEbQ
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