I awoke from a dream this morning, not from mere sleep, but a dream. This experience possessed my mind as wholly as though I had just been there, and I lay awake then in the bed and stared into the infinite space above, as infinite as bedroom ceilings can often be, and saw the scene of it complete. This act itself became a part of the dream, as I often comment on my dreams as I am dreaming them. I criticize this thing or that, remembering in the dream some odd thing I have done before, said before, meant to say before, not by way of changing the dream, which I cannot because it is as permanent as something I have done when I was awake, but by way of placing the event in the context of my life.
I dream in color. I say this somewhat defensively because I read once that some twit of a scientist had conducted a test and found that we dream in black and white. I don’t know who would have believed this. No one I knew at the time dreamed in black and white. Though it is the sort of foolishness that ‘scientists’ do with public money. But then, I cannot even change the color of a thing in my dream. Whatever I found a thing to be in my dream, that is the color it is.
This, in fact, is a matter of some importance to me. I worry about it. But then, I worry about all sort of foolish things and never seem to be ready for the important ones. The only way I can escape the matters in my dream is to forget them. Let them fade away. And the fading of the colors is part of that. But, of course, I am aware of this, so I will write them down, like this, to keep them in mind.
Though I often have conversations in my dreams, I seldom remember those unless I manage to get some set of words down as soon as possible after I awake, and then it is as if I have opened a bottle of shaken soda water, all sorts of words come out, unbidden. And often, if I get some of those down, I can better reconstruct what happened in the dream before that last scene when I awoke. The more I recall that, the more I remember. A chain, a rope, or a string of words. A thread, as in a sweater. And the funny thing about all that, to me at least, is that the words I remember are often just the small quips and criticism I made when I was dreaming.
The word I remembered most clearly this morning, after I awoke, was ‘trespass.’ Having been a Catholic boy, that word is indelibly attached to the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ where it is plural, but this was just the singular word. As if I was in the midst of committing such an act. And that thought had brought me to an examination of the thing I was doing in the dream, while I was dreaming. And that act of criticism angered me in the midst of it, as it was disturbing the beauty of the dream, and my own desires at the moment of the dream. And I think that anger is what awakened me.
I dreamed I was in an old hotel, an Italian hotel, first in a lobby that was not ornate but high ceilinged and decorated with a few tapestries and with lights in interesting fixtures. The walls were deeply colored in various ochres from yellow to brown. Some specific areas were a deep forest green. The floors were decoratively tiled. I smelled a cigar. Not a common smell in hotels these days, though once to be expected. The lobby was not empty but I cannot remember any of the people that were there except the woman I was with and a thin desk clerk who took my name.
The woman and I started to go up some wide stairs, but she stopped, I think because they were very long, and then we took an elevator. The elevator had an expanding brass gate and was relatively small. I was aware of being close to the woman there. And, I was immediately commenting on the fact that such elevators might still be common in Europe, and were quite common in America when I was young, but we don’t see them so often these days. Then I worried for a moment about children getting their fingers caught in the gate.
The hallway above was broad, again high ceilinged, and carpeted; the doors large and brass handled. I noticed that between every two or three rooms, there was a side hallway that led to a small balcony. The balcony opened on a large plaza where there were shops and cafes, a large and elaborate fountain, and a cathedral across. It was daytime there and the contrast between the scene outside, the fountain water glistening in yellow late afternoon sunlight, and the darkness inside made me comment as well.
I then opened one door on the hall that was clearly unlocked and inside it seemed too dark and there were hanging plants, overflowing their pots and traveling along the floor toward the window. I commented on the fact that it must be difficult to clean the rooms with plants like that.
I used to work in hotels during college and for several years afterward. I have a great deal of affection for them. Yes, affection. These were odd old places of nooks and crannies and revealed the eccentric tastes of local owners. A typical hotel these days is a sterile place, designed for the convenience of the corporate management more than the pleasure of the customer. Cleaning staff travel from room to room, and with every room the same, move as fast as possible, leaving small envelopes on the useless mass-produced pressed-wood desks in the hope of a gratuity for their labor.
I often feel fortunate that my own experience with hotels goes back to a previous era when the better ones had rooms that were larger and each different enough to remember. I recall one in Richmond, Virginia, where the women who had cleaned the room before our arrival came to the door with a bar of soap and a small ornate butter dish and made an apology for the broken fixture in the bathroom. Not a fancy room, but clean and neat, facing a congestion of railroad tracks, and decorated uniquely with original old pictures of Richmond that were not the same from room to room (I checked), and solid wood furniture that had been made right there in the city. But I remember that room more because of the housekeeper who had bothered to return to correct for the broken bathroom fixture without our asking. A simple thing.
I never found the room that was intended for us in my dream. I awoke with the thought, as I looked into the darkened room where runners from the plants were traveling out across the oriental carpet on the floor, that the plants needed more light than that. But that I should not even be there to see this. That opening the door had been a trespass.
And then I remembered the hotel in Richmond where the pictures on the wall had all been unique and tried to absolve myself for having opened this one door with the excuse that I had just wanted to see what the room was like.
I have never been to Italy. My children have, and one daughter lived there for a time. But I have always wanted to go and see what it was like. I felt that sense in my thoughts within the dream. And then, in a somewhat typical fashion, that excuse for opening the door dissolved into my being in a strange hotel with a woman who was not my wife.
And the Lord’s Prayer.