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December 5, 2005

paris - a dream

Mostly fragments today, but on the upside it seems I finally got around to processing the waking trip I just took to France.

Dreamt of travel, travel, travel by train, plane and helicopter, all of it on or about an unnamed volcanic island populated by French-speaking black folks. (Haiti? Martinique? Genosha?) On the books the island (a city-state really) is a high-tech, black-run paradise, ziggurat skyscrapers reaching for a postcard blue heaven, but the streets are heavy with moist banana smell, the tiny republic rotting away in stages, pretending to a high-mindedness (liberté, egalité, fraternité?) that never quite trickles down into anyone's day-to-day.

I fly into the city on videogame wings. I see my plane (propeller?) from the outside, its fuselage an unlikely burnished super-silver. Code generated lens-flare blossoms like firework across my mental image as the plane glides, swooping down through shaving cream clouds before buzzing the city-state's man-made canyons on the way to the airport. I watch and watch and get that funny sense of awe I get whenever I play a next-generation game console for the first time. Who knew an extra million polygons would look this good? Those Japanese cats sure know their stuff.

I'm on the island for business, here to buy a building or maybe a business. I'm carrying a lot of someone else's money, digital money or maybe encoded the old fashioned way in my signature or handshake. An old boss of mine flies in with me, but once we're on the island we never go look at any sites or meet any people. I walk around the city looking up at the buildings - think Blade Runner with sunshine - the celly pressed to my ear. I'm on hold the entire dream, that or I'm having testy, broken-French conversations with receptionists, hotel operators, assistants. I can't get through to anyone. I lose track of my boss and then have to call and call looking for him. He's left his hotel room and has gone sightseeing. No one can find him.

I ride the island's subway aimlessly. This particular system comes with just two lines, each with exactly four stops. A vast, imperial central station connects the two lines. The central station is bloated, a marble monstrosity. Its surface has been carved out of pinkish-brown stone and the place has the under-lit, unfocused ambiance of museum statuary that's been shot by a tourist using digital camera presets and weak flash.

A hotel operator berates me for my poor French. I speak better French when I'm awake but can barely put together a sentence here. When she puts me on hold I notice that all phone numbers on the island come in the same format:

XXX-29-XXX

I take in the recurring 29, decide that for the rest of the dream I'll pretend to a vague numerological unease. In my waking life, I always take note of numbers that could be subsets of a plausible lifespan, like my age plus one for example. (This year, the lucky number is 38.) I suck on the 29 like it's a particularly resistant candy, some kind of mental gobstopper. Do I have 29 more years of life? Did I die when I was 29? Soft-center or chewable?

When I'm not on the train I ride in a helicopter that takes me from building to building. More pixellated aeronautic excess. My pilot talks too much too, tells me how he dreams of emigrating to America. I nod absently, wonder if I could fly the thing if I had to.

There are men with machine guns guarding the streets.

The wandering motif that consumed the whole first half of the dream suddenly evaporates. I forget it as if it never happened. Instead of traveling and wandering I now dream that I have been in my hotel room since the day I arrived. I lay in bed eating crepes, watching French television. I watch "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" in German for hours, as well as "The Weakest Link." I discover a genre of talk show where 10 or 15 Italians sit on a stage chatting and laughing. It's the same set-up every night. I'm baffled by the booking - politicians? Footballers? B-list celebrities? An African-seeming gent walks on stage in a tweed jacket and the crowd goes wild. He waves back coolly, his hands clasped over his head.

The hotel room morphs around me, extravagant and minimal at the same time. I am Dave Bowman slowly chewing a Kubrickian steak.

The European women on the television all have enormous breasts. I wonder if this is a natural phenomenon, or something innate to the televised European. I'm confused by their plenitude. I have flown in from California, where every other woman is an actress with implants.

Except for the Italian African I never see any black people on the hotel television. I wonder why if the island has its own channel, why the hotel doesn't carry it.

I decide that there's something gravitationally off with the island. On the pressboard desk in my hotel room sits a doodad, one of those magnets that's been floated on a superconducting surface, science in miraculous action. This particular doodad is eccentric in design and execution - a wine cork stuffed like a pimento olive with magnet, then floated in a U-shaped, superconducting trough. Every now and then the magnet, like a cat suddenly starting at nothing, rotates impossibly on its axis. I call down to ask the concierge if the island is prone to earthquakes, but he only berates me for my poor conjugation.

Just before I wake, my dream settled down to a single arc with the appearance in my room of Chantal, an old friend from high school. In real life Chantal had been one of the few kids at my high school who lived in my neighborhood, and she was also one of a handful of Haitian kids attending besides me. In the dream she lives on the island and has come on goodwill mission to get me out of the room.

"You should see the sights," she says.

Before we can leave, though, she loses her favorite brooch somewhere in my hotel room. I can't leave the room until it's found. She describes it to me in great detail, a silver duck with pearl feathers, blue gems for eyes, a golden beak. Days pass, flashing by in bursts of looking and waiting. Chantal seems increasingly annoyed at me, as if the loss is my fault. I make increasingly desultory searches of the hotel room in reaction to her anger, moving the couch and peering under the bed. I find brooches - gilded Hello Kitty characters, mostly - but none of them hers. I go to sleep, wake up and find her moving the cushions on the couch around. I worry that she will read my journal while I'm sleeping.

The next time she leaves, she takes the dream's POV with her. She goes home, where she has dinner with an older woman who may or may not be her mother. It seems that I have disappeared. No one answers the phone in my room when she calls. The hotel staff has ventured in, found my things but no me. She asks about her brooch. Negative.

The older woman worries for my safety. It is getting dark. Chantal demurs. She explains that when we were in high school we would stay out after curfew all the time, dodging patrols and skirting checkpoints.

"He'll be fine," she says. I dream of agreeing with her. I wonder what it is I am doing.

[eNd.]

Posted by ebogjonson in dream log, places, on December 5, 2005 5:22 PM

Comments

Posted by: the izza at December 8, 2005 7:31 AM