9:05 a.m. - 2023-10-04
dream door
Does anyone else revisit and recognize the same dream neighborhoods/landscapes? It could be a trick of the subconscious of course; this sense of familiarity...maybe we've never dreamed ourselves here before in our dream lives? But if so it's good one, and convincingly rendered.
I woke up with a map of one in my mind yesterday. The lingering topography and layout of which I clocked after a cup of coffee; a locale I recognized as a less-than-noteworthy stretch of blocks surrounding the intersection of Sunset and Alvarado Street in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Where Pioneer Chicken used to be; the one where Warren Zevon used to cop dope. Disappointing really, as dreamscapes go. It was augmented of course; with architecture lifted from beach communities in R.I. and the Central Coast. Some irrepressible memories of New Orleans and lower Manhattan shouldered their way in too, as they will, smudged all up into the “vibe”. But mostly it was shitty ol' Echo Park, and I was homeless. Homeless in my own head.
No worries though, an elderly couple had taken me in and allowed me to live in the customer bathroom of their storefront comic-book shop. She was kind as I recall; wore a babushka and swept w/a primitive broom, he looked like Geppetto from “Pinocchio”. Also, to reiterate, they owned a comic book shop?? Anyway some subsequent dream drama/static ensued without distinct impression, but resulted in the door to the shop being suddenly and violently kicked in. Probably by cops (another possibility: robbers). This left me in fitful and familiar territory. It was gonna be a work dream.
This is a mundane subset of the “puzzle dreams” I have frequently; usually involving an elaborate escape, a quest to decipher something, or most commonly, a complex and revolutionary invention. The work dream involves all the stress and anxiety of these scenarios, only instead of exotic dream-props and surreal plot-lines I'm charged with a more familiar task. In this case: hanging a door. This is a bread-and-butter staple of carpentry, and while any competent tradesman can do it, it's inevitably a pain in the ass. Anyway, we clearly needed to replace their splintered shop-door so we set off for the lumberyard...
Which looked vaguely familiar (and given the percentage of my life I've spent in them, it should have). I steered Geppetto towards the door department with the necessary dimensions and set about shopping for hinges, hardware etc...trying to remember if I had a chisel and a screw-gun stashed in my homeless backpack under the sink, back in the customer bathroom I called home (work dreams suck). After what felt like a very-long while, the shop owner and his wife returned.
“Dude, that is not the door I told to you to get.”
“I try to tell him!”, his wife exclaimed in a thick Eastern-European accent.
Truth be told, one would be hard-pressed to fuck up a door order any worse than Geppetto had here. Because the “door” he'd selected was, in fact, a grandfather clock.
And not just any grandfather clock; this one was made of glass. It's hard to imagine what casting such a massive, finely-detailed piece would entail...yet it possessed the clarity and elegant angularity of cut-crystal; of a Waterford whiskey tumbler. The face was exquisitely wrought of more traditional materials, and within it's hollow core one could make out the brass silhouette of the pendulum. It was massive, weighing well-north of 300 lbs. He didn't like any of the other doors, he explained, and his heart was set on this one, so end-of-discussion. “I guess we won't be needing any hinges then”, I thought, as we wrestled the clock into the back of his van.
It took up the entire doorway. And, as it lacked the open/close functionality of a more-traditional door, me and Geppetto had to get up every morning and, grunting and straining, pull it back just-far enough that the customers could squeeze past. To you know, shop for comic books.
(I got nothing on this one folks, analysis-wise.)
