In the dream I had last night a friend and I were walking down this weird section of Columbus which we had never seen before. It was much more beautiful than the real city, with wildly different styles of architecture from all over the world. But it wasn’t the same type of eclectic style that dots tourist attractions like Disneyland or Vegas, the place we were in somehow did it with more… dignity. Like it didn’t try to recreate actual structures but made instead new buildings out of certain design influences. There was function behind the form, I guess you could say. And they weren’t necessarily new, like they’d obviously been there a while, it’s hard to explain. Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” did the same thing but this was scaled down to Columbus level. One building I remember kind of looked like Angkor Wat in Cambodia with the same weird spires which always looked like ears of corn to me. Another mimicked Ancient Greece or Washington, DC if you want to go more modern. It was glistening white with towering columns. Whether they were Doric, Ionic or Corinthian I could not tell. Then arching over everything was something like the Roman Aqueduct, only shorter. We went by a large church which I wish I could describe but I don’t think words can paint a proper picture, but I think it combined the styles of both the east and west. I just remember it was so beautiful that I turned to my friend and joked about living there some day.
Soon we arrived in more familiar territory, the area around Broad Street near the dorms where the Byer’s used to be before CCAD bought the building and made it into classrooms. To our surprise construction crews were working round the clock trying to make it like the place we had just been in, but this time it seemed like they were just adding on to old buildings instead of making them from scratch (except for these little arches that looked like the ones made in Central Park by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Once building near the State Auto insurance building already has these). For example, there’s one bridge farther down Broad Street which is used by trains, only in my dream it was much closer since dreams seem to like to compress landmarks. Anyway, construction crews seemed to be layering more bridges over it like blocks. Oh, and the same crews were unloading bales of hay and leaving them on the corner of the sidewalk. I remember wondering what the hell they were doing, and then I remembered some sort of parade was going through town. The circus? But what sort of event was so magnificent that they’d need to dress up entire buildings for it? Anyway, that was pretty much the only abnormal part of the dream, besides the fact that it was t-shirt weather in the middle of winter and we were carrying bent pieces of metal, using them as canes and trying to imitate the walk of the gang from “A Clockwork Orange.”
My dreams often feel like the last place that capture that sense of wonder I had in my childhood. Movies come close but dreams have the added bonus of putting you right in the middle of things even more than “Avatar” ever could. Could James Cameron boast that he can duplicate the warmth of sunlight on your back or the feeling of movement in your legs as you navigate your surroundings instead of staring at a screen? I don’t know why I’m being philosophical, I just wanted to get my memories of my dream down before I forgot them.
