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The Topography of Dreams

Tie me to a chair. Drip water on my head, Chinese torture style. Put a gun to my head. Threaten to burn my most promised possession--my laptop. Promise me all the pain and suffering in the world if I don't tell you my favorite part of living.
Well, hell, you wouldn't have to go to that extreme, but if you did, I'd tell you.
It's dreaming.
Yeah, dreaming. Not that there's anything wrong with the waking world, but the Midnight Realm never ceases to intrigue me. I mean, day by day, I'll go through my routine and little of it will make much of an impression. But on those all-too-rare occasions when I remember my dreams from the night before, I'm left thinking about it for days on end.
It might seem to most that the Midnight Realm is an unordered, illogical, irrational place. I don't think so. I think it's built on a different logic than the one we use during the day. It has a geography and an order, nonlinear, non-Euclidean, but everything has its place and its purpose.
Many of my dreams take place in the real world. That is, the real world with all the secret places and pockets revealed. Many of my dreams take place here in San Leandro, except you won't find the settings on any map. They're in between the lines. Under the ink. Something. Like that dream I had a few nights ago with this shopping center where Manor meets Washington Avenue, sort of. Actually, the shopping center is between the end of Manor and Washington, in a bit of a cul de sac you can find if you navigate Fargo and the other side streets. When I was there, in my dream, I knew it was real. It belonged there. Yet...in the real San Leandro, there is no such place. There isn't room for it. Somehow, in the dream, that secret pocket of reality became apparent, and I was able to shop for video games, and run away from the bad guys with my ex-wife, and all sorts of other escapades. (By the way, this shopping center had lots of vacancies. Goes to figure.)
My favorite place in the Midnight Realm is the Dunfey Hotel, host of Eternicon, the gaming convention that never ends, but never begins, either. Here's how it works, in one dream after another: I arrive at the hotel Saturday night or so. The convention's been going on since Friday night, at least in my world. I go into the hotel and look for my room. Inevitably the twisting ramps of the Dunfey lead me...somewhere else. Like Tanelorn or Cynosure, the Dunfey of Eternicon touches upon all parts of the Midnight Realm. For example, If you take the elevator to the fifth floor (the real Dunfey has only three), you emerge on a bayside road, with a few suites facing out on the San Francisco Bay. A long paved trail leads on to infinity. People walk, jog, push baby strollers. None of them are gamers.
Eventually I find my room, and somehow end up staying there. Suddenly, I realize there's a convention going on, and I'm missing it! So off I go to find it...and once again I get lost in the mazes of the Dunfey Hotel, Midnight Realm branch.
I know the Dunfey inside and out. I've spent more than a month of my life there. And I know that it doesn't really touch upon all these different places, it isn't infinitely vast. Yet, somehow, it is. I just can't go there when I'm awake.
Maybe you've seen those Levi's commercials on TV recently? The ones with the slogan "they go on?" My dreams are a lot like that. A number of separate events, locations, people, none really connected, yet all touching each other, all part of the same reality. I'll start in one location, with a certain group of people, but I'll pass through the setting from another recurring dream, or someone will have a cameo in a dream they don't belong in. If you tried to link them all together, you probably could, but you might need a four-dimensional map to do it.
I'm not the sort to try to dig into my dreams too deeply. I certainly don't take them literally. Perhaps they're trying to tell me something, perhaps not. I do know this--if I couldn't visit the Midnight Realm every now and again, where magic can really happen and the world is deeper than we can grasp, I would certainly go mad.

All contents of Skaldheim (C) 2001 by Jefferson Krogh.
URL: http://skaldheim.com/musings/candle/candle1.html
Revised: August 9, 2001.