dream house
Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a big city that was full of houses that looked like this? There would be little secret cafes hidden behind giant ferns and big swimming holes with waterfalls. Tree house venues with shows and secret passageways. Like the Ewok village, or Pandora in Avatar, but more urban. I would like to live there. Have dance parties every night, make fruit salad for breakfast and add wine for sangria in the evening. And it would be a totally normal place to live, not some paradise you run away to because you can’t stand the real world, where everyone is cultish or lost or both, and there are only the sharks and the vulnerable. The kind of utopian communal lifestyle appeals to me, but often turn into this and I wish it wasn’t so. Why can’t utopia be normative?
Ahem. I’m feeling unusually chipper today after some iced coffee and the first good night’s sleep of the week. I get my best dreams when I sleep in. I usually have very vivid dreams, involving a bunch of different people and traveling around different imaginary cities. Last night I was walking around a neighborhood where the streets were very narrow and there were one story houses all places very close together. It kind of reminded me of Seattle, the Mission and LA melded together. I went to this old movie theater.. one of those tiny ones that show weird movies at weird times and have tons of colorful paint all over the walls and outside. They played independent/experimental/artsy films and I just happened to show up right when a good one was going to play.
The thing I like best about dreams like this is exploring all these new places. There is a whole nother world out there. Sometimes I like to think that my dreams are partially seeing the future. Sometime they’re like an alternate reality I can access through a sleep portal through spacetime. I always go to new places in my dreams, but when I wake up I’m still here, doing the same thing I did yesterday. The change is much more gradual.
Dream City by Jay Gazley
I wish my dreams were real. Not the ones where I’m being chased or something bad is happening, but even the ones that don’t make a ton of sense take place in really awesome places. Once I couldn’t find my passport trying to get back home from some major city. The airport was a big mall with carnival games that looked like the Guggenheim Museum, and I was already late to meet the group I was with. I guess it was some class trip. I met these guys who I made friends with and they took me to their really cool apartment with tall ceilings, white walls, and pink lights, and we hung out and smoked and I was having a really good time until I remembered I woudn’t be able to get home and had to run and catch a bus back to the airport.
The thing I like most about my dreams, besides exploring the worlds within them, is that all these places get created in my head. And damn, if my brain could project my dreams onto a screen, I’d make millions. Maybe in a past life I was a bad ass architect and urban planner, or maybe I just watch a lot of movies, but the world in my dreams is so cool.
Last night in a different dream I went to this neighborhood that had this long street where every house was a big artist studio with awesome artists living there, and some big warehouse spaces for parties and shows and things. It was a very open community and you could apply to get one of the studios, and I was trying to convince the organizers that I belonged there. I kept running into artists I knew.
Dream City by Paul Klee
It’s especially nice to have dreams like this after spending all week working on paperwork well into the night and watching bad movies. Sometimes when I’m awake it feels like my little room is the whole world. The only part of my real life that resembles those dreams is the part that I can only imagine, the future. I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say “follow your dreams” but I hope someday my life gets closer to looking like what my dreams look like. New and dark and mysterious and dramatic where there’s something different just around the corner and I can still get lost and meet new people. If nothing else, it would be exciting.
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