kalopsia

29 July 2011 - 9:27

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

I dreamed that my best friend and I moved to a second-floor flat in an abandoned town house in London. We joked that we were in the Squat 2 Rent program because if we lived there secretly long enough and fixed it up, the owner of the building would let us rent it (and thus stay in England long after our visas expired). I'll spare you stray details like the peasant boy from another time who also inhabited the flat and the 3rd-storey squatters and the cats and the gumball machine because I know other people's dreams can be boring.

I texted him (not the building owner, not the anachronistic peasant boy) with the following: "I am in England." He understood my exact location from those words alone and materialised at the flat.

We were close in the dream, but not quite like lovers. Maybe that was implied. He took me to his university campus, even though that would have been some years back for him, and introduced me to friends I have really met while awake. And then we gathered our galoshes (?) and took a ferry ride to Wales. His family was on the ferry, and some of them were black.

There is a city I have been dreaming about for years and years and years. It looks like a mix of Prague, Edinburgh, and San Francisco. Sometimes it's in Canada and sometimes it's in China and once it was in Yugoslavia. Last time I dreamed of it it was called Victoria; the last few times I've been there I had to cross water to get to it. This time it was in Wales. It is The City Where Down Every Street and Alley and Around Every Corner Is the Photo I've Always Wanted to Take.

He saw my latest set of photos of it, and he gasped and exclaimed, "Darling, you've invented a new kind of photography!" Each photo was taken looking down a street. Successive photos were snapped at the exact spot of the horizon line of the preceding photo, so that taken together, all the photos of all the streets made a sort of telescoping map of The City.

When I am awake I am halfway dreaming, and I can turn everywhere I go into The City, and when I fall in love I turn the person who's struck my fancy into The Lover Who Fulfills Me Endlessly. It is a fantasy, and when that person goes from my love or my lover to The Lover, I take something away from him, something vital. I have come to realize this is the cruelest form of kalopsia.

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>