Bulletin 3: Places that are other places
A collection of ‘Metamorphosing topographies of dreamland’ from the dream document - assembled by JS, 14 April
Dreamt that I arrived in Santiago de Chile by bus, except it was in southern Spain.
Late evening in London. Brother’s been arrested so I go to bail him out. When I get there he’s already out, waiting for me in a bar from the 80s Japanese movie Violent Cop.
Was in a dream last night inside a flat that contained different rooms from all the different places I stayed when I still lived in Edinburgh.
Im at S’s flat in jerusalem, it’s not the flat but it is.
Dream is set in “Brussels Archive” located in Paris.
I am in Berlin at his place tho everything looks very different than in “real life”
i am in Florida. i seem to work at Disneyland, or at least the university is situated there. we are being sent home. there is a catastrophe or something we've done wrong. with jess we want to cross country but we don’t know if we have a car. something is too late. i am in a georgian square near my parents’ house in London - some kind of remunerated sexual act with a businessman who came to pick me up one afternoon on a motorbike.
Am in a big market place, later which later becomes fixed as 19th century les Halles, but I’m in Norway, for now it is faceless
It’s Norway except it’s clearly 19th century Les Halles and Devon stitched together.
I dream in fragments, all intense, all differently city-flavoured. My mind is trying to convince itself there are still places to go?
I’m at a crowded club which is also a theatre and an airport.
We’re in a room, a big white room. No: it’s more of a zone, a situated space that turns into something else as it lands. At one point, it feels like the sandy bed of a dry river – all white sand bushes bright sky and us free exercising. And then it’s a room again. Clear huge walls, so huge we can’t see where they end and the roof starts. But we live here. Actually it’s a club and we live upstairs and we are the new roommates
The setting was based on a photograph I made of the Block Island Ferry, which I realized later. We were there, on that Long Island Sound, but this ferry boat was actually in the Mediterranean and the angle of view (frame) was different than this camera I used in the photograph of the Ferry, because I was experimenting lazily at this moment in with a 6x9 frame, but the dream frame today was more like my normal 6x7, tighter frame,
I had to meet my friend Jane at a pub in Galway and it was snowing and I was on a bike but it looked actually like a tiny Prussian-empire kinda town
all seemed to take place in M’s bedroom. At least the house ‘compressed’ into that space, which is differently configured in the dream.
We’re heading back to the house of one of L’s relatives, in a village called Les Malades, “The Sick Ones”. I suggest cutting through the fields, rather than walking along the road, and claim that it is more direct. The field becomes a mountain
I was in Ibiza, except it was clearly Bournemouth seafront.
I am in China. It looks like a mixture of LA and an affluent North London neighbourhood. A lot of standalone houses with incredible windows.
I’m in an airport lobby, I’m going to Brazil. I am going to someone’s birthday, but the first thing I do when I get there is to go to a luncheon with one of my friends from college (IRL she is protestant and used to be very into theology, went on to work in the Economy Ministry and now has a baby girl with a French guy). A guy I hate, who used to go out with one of my best friends is also there, with his girlfriend (IRL as well as in the dream all the girlfriends he’s had since my best friend are basically always the same girl, they all look a lot like my friend, the same exact features and always super nice. They all stay the same age while he gets older and older). We talk a bit, but I don’t remember what we talked about; this guy is a class A mansplainer, but I think I was actually enjoying this conversation. We are eating black beans, wonderful feijoada and rice. My friend from college starts laughing and says that they took the lunch from the patriarchs, I realize that we are actually in some kind of farm,
I’m looking for somewhere to live on the internet, in the physical space of my dream, the room I look at adjoins directly on to the room we live in
Dreamt I was in Ms Wheeler’s maths class again. But it was in Scotland and I was doing A Levels. I see someone running along the seafront and into the water. The room I am in is in Bloomsbury anti cuts space and it is high up on a platform. (On reflection I suppose this space resembles the first floor of the CLC - community learning centre - which was built at my school in the 2000s to make it a ‘specialist learning’ school, merely because the quality of education and the grades were so bad and the school was possibly on ‘special measures’). On the east side is a garden, on the west side, an airport which is a similar rectangular room at an angle to the rectangular room we are in, or a walkway or highway leading to an airport.
I’m going to the airport. The road for the airport is on the left, it adjoins on to the room I am in. Off to the right, something else - it is like the Beirut highway city system, where you emerge up onto a highway and can see the sea.
On our way to the airport we stop by a mall, which finds itself near to the maths classroom, on the ground floor, to the North side of it.
I move home. To a big house, in an anonymous location, except the trees are like those by the Forum in Rome, and the air is sunny, slow and grainy-grey. It may be Tunbridge Wells, possibly a private school.
He was traveling back to California from Berlin, going to his parents’ home first then coming to visit me. He was on his way, in traffic, it would take about an hour and a half.
I vaguely remember walking and running around this house which looked more like a ship made of wood than my actual flat, but I felt it was my home. I knew this place very well even if all the furniture and the architecture was different. The next thing I remember is me standing in a room that kind of looked like my bedroom, but without a roof and the op bjen sky.
I was in London (that of course had nothing to do w london, and was more of a mashup between green hills and product design degree show booths
I am moving through a city in an uncertain light flickering between day and night, there is a
I dream that my parents have bought a new house during quarantine. In my dream I call it a tudor building in my head, but really, it’s a kind of suburban red brick Victorian construction, like a mixture between what you find in the North of London, next to the M25, and Victorian Gothic in Salt Lake City.
On the way to Berlin, somewhere level with the south of France there were chaotic scenes of my adolescence, changing schools, and I got caught in a loop going round and round St Pancras way and Camley street in a caravan of vehicles going through the bayou.
Some images of Cubitt street and suburbs (Cubitt st is a kind of street where the council puts all kinds of ‘social cases’, it is a kind of containment strategy of theirs), that I float through or watch from a distance. It is like Nice: lilac-y grey modernity, palm trees. It looks like an architect’s drawing, a twilight zone.
We are in my grandmother’s house. But it is not her house, it is much more English, like a house in a Wilkie Collins novel. It is more ornamented, English and gothic than her house is. She is dead.
Very briefly it’s the 2nd version, with some dispute as to who sleeps where in a series of connected messy rooms on slightly different levels of what feels both like an office building and an 18thC (?) European battle ship a la Billy Bud maybe, separated by short staircases and strewn with floor mattresses. Money is due someone - police are in the distance, invisible but working to close in on us (‘us’ is who knows).. Dissolves into what I recognise as my room.
I walked through an urban street. I felt I was both in London and a Midwestern American city. I passed under what had been a theater awning with hundreds of individual light bulbs; many were missing. I thought how nice it must've been when this city was in its heyday. I saw a black London taxicab, which suggested I was in London.
I dreamed that I visited you. Except it was Australia.
I was in central London, maybe Paris, maybe Norwich, in a place like the Southbank. There was a large concrete wall / bank which was inset with a huge array of telephone exchange connectors.
I am walking through narrowish streets in the city I’ve been living in, maybe it’s Leeds or London or Glasgow or maybe it’s just a mix but it feels more like London, and up a back alleyway, at night,
My next dream ends with looking at a map of the Firth of Clyde OS map (which hangs next to my bed) wondering where I could do a long bike ride and realising that the town of Ayr isn’t actually on the coast any more but inland, just southwest of Glasgow. Then I find myself with my friend Callie out on some marina or dock on the Clyde estuary or the sea itself.