It isn’t surprising to me that dreams are thought to be portals to alternate realities, at least of some description. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do, as I do this morning, they are strangely twisted landscapes in which alternative systems of logic apply.
I don’t actually believe that dreams are windows into anything other than the dreamer’s mind: I recall, many years ago, dreaming of a sequence of numbers that, in the dream, won a lottery. I went out and bought a lottery ticket, and kept buying tickets for some weeks. That number did not win anything.
I woke this morning from a dream.
I was returning from prison – I have no idea what I had been imprisoned for. I walked across the parking lot of a gas station under sparse Garry oaks to my townhouse, which seemed to have been built in the parking lot of a 1960’s era strip mall. When I got to the townhouse, I saw that the front steps had been taken away.
“This must have happened while I was in prison,” I said in my dream, with impeccable logic.
I opened the door somehow, though the knob would have been about four feet higher than I could have reached. I managed to climb in by bracing my feet on both sides of the door frame – again, this dream lodging obeyed its own peculiar logic. Once inside, I discovered that someone was in the middle of extensive renovation. A few dream-minutes later, I realized that it was repair, not renovation, for there appeared to be some rot and water damage that were being removed.
The stairs to the upper floor had been replaced, although they were linked together like the slats on a blind, and you could flatten them into a slide or move them back into being stairs just by pushing on them. The entire lower floor was a skeleton, all of the wall board stripped off, and the bare plywood of the floor exposed.
I decided to go upstairs to see what the condition was up there. I flipped the stairs into stairs and started climbing. After a while, I realized that I was climbing past figures cocooned in sleeping bags, figures that looked at me grumpily as I passed. When I reached the upper floor, I found that once again dream logic was present, for the upper floor was at least four times the size of the lower. I did not pause to reflect on the fact that this was not evident from outside the building.
I found that I had a roommate. I was unsurprised by this, so I suppose I must have had a roommate all along and just not thought of it. The unnamed roommate, who bore no resemblance to anyone I can think of other than Cousin Larry from the 80’s sitcom Perfect Strangers, was in his turn surprised to see me. He had no idea I was getting out of prison.
He had been busy, it seems. In addition to repairing or renovating the lower floor, he appeared to have turned the upper floor into a combination of a bed and breakfast and a call center. There were cubicles around, and the walls had been painted dark. Clumps of people gathered and talked, and there was a general swirl of activity that made finding him a little difficult.
There had to be a hundred and fifty people up there on the second floor of my townhouse. My roommate did not seem to consider this unusual, or even remarkable, and he balked at my suggestion that I needed a place to live, and all of these people, including the ones on the stairs, needed to leave.
I woke up, not having resolved this situation.