dream

This morning after MSH left for his early tee time, I fell back asleep and had a dream that I was a man named Manbuk Choudhury. I was a famous Indian architect, who had designed many important buildings, usually involving glass. My assistant was a white guy, very friendly.

My four-year-old son was named Bhopal. (He was very cute.) For no reason that I could tell, Bhopal and I were detained at a series of checkpoints as we tried to get to a meeting with my assistant. The security guards weren’t satisfied with my ID and it seemed to me I was undergoing racial profiling. (Because the building I was trying to get into was large?) I was especially nervous because I was planning on escaping with my wife and son. When I finally met up with my assistant, he called the place I was going to “the point of a hill in the middle of jungle.”

After waiting for more than an hour, they finally let us through so I picked up Bhopal and went up the escalator. We met up with my assistant and the three of us climbed up onto the pyramidal glass roof of the building, which was covered with a cloth or tarp. My assistant (I don’t remember his name) said he had a surprise for me, since the building was finally finished, and I was about to surreptitiously leave public life for that point of hill. With a flourish, he pulled the cloth off the glass at the pinnacle of the building’s roof to reveal the pattern of transparent glass—the surprise was that he had had the artists and workmen insert panes of colored glass, where the plans had indicated colorless glass. It was very beautiful. We went back inside and walked under the glass roof, enjoying the play of colors.

The dream morphed. I was myself again. Trying to get to work. In Seattle, but the landscape seemed vaguely more European, nothing like the real Seattle. Also, my sister and her husband were there, with their friends. They were getting to work in an open trolley car (note that I just got back from San Francisco, where I rode the obligatory cable car trolley) she had built. It only seated six and they were full up, but they kept driving back and forth, almost taunting me, but I didn’t seem to mind except that it broke my concentration and I was desperately trying to remember how I could get to work. Could I drive? I couldn’t remember if I had a place to park. Park and ride the MAX? Where was the parking lot? DID Seattle have a MAX? I thought it was in Portland. Could I ride a bus? (Odd that I would have an anxiety dream about commuting because my commute is seven minutes long, door-to-door, and I have a free parking space.) And every time I turned away, my car (which is also my car in real life) would move somehow. We were on the side of a wide thoroughfare to our left, divided by concrete strips—it was so wide I could barely see to the other side. On our right was a wooded area with some body of water but this was all fairly vague. My sister backed up onto a curb next to me so that three of the four trolley wheels started to drop off. They were wheels of the sort you find on children’s red wagons. I stuck one back on and ran to the next and the one I’d just put on would fall off again, all to the great amusement of my sister and her friends. Finally I spotted the problem. The trolley had just been lowered onto the wheels with vertical columns sticking into them, and hadn’t actually been attached, so the trolley was just resting on the wheels, like casters. I held up one of the wheels to my sister: “SCREWS?! Perhaps?!” Here my memory of the dream(s) ends.