Weird dream topographies

Started writing this for here and then it got really long so I put it on my blog cos it seemed a waste not to, but still wanted to post it here, so am doing.

I want to write about and share the weird topographies that I experience in dreams, which I think are recurring for me, and see if other people experience something similar.

On the ILX Inception thread a couple of years ago (and more) I wrote the following about how the topographies in the film reflected those in my own dreams:

[Nolan] didn't try to make the representation of dreams here too weird and far-out; I know that my dreams inhabit weird emotional territory, have weird physics, etcetera, but the settings are pretty mundane, very much secondary in importance to the emotional territory that the dream is creating or inhabiting, and I think Nolan goes for that here to an extent too by not making the dream environments too Burton or Del Toro weird (much as I adore Del Toro).

...

The shared dream logic and dream design resonated very much with me, especially the limbo level of Di Caprio and Cotillard's subconscious romance; the receding rows of buildings, the familiar houses behind fences and moved into strange new positions, all seemed like experiences from my own dreams. I tend to fly, or be being chased, or be in familiar but not quite right situations in my own dreams, rather than have outrageous fantastical stuff happen. This captured the dream state for me as well as anything else, and is up with Waking Life as far as that goes (much as I love Waking Life, a lot of it does not remind me of my own dreams, but feels much more like a cinematic representation of what we think of dreams of being, at least visually; narrative or lack thereof is perhaps closer to real dreaming, but the it's a film just about dreaming as opposed to a plot within a shared dream).

Last night I dreamt that Em and I had a baby (I think we adopted it in the dream: I think it probably represented my irl new nephew, as it was about the same age and was a boy) and we'd left the baby with my parents in the town where I used to live for a couple of days. When we came back and fetched him he could walk and stuff, which was freaky. Anyway, we were driving what was recognisably our car around what was recognisably but not quite the small town I grew up in - there was a flat area of carpark where there isn't irl, and roads up the hills and forest behind my parents' house that follow the actual irl roads relatively closely but not quite the same: one of the dream roads is actually where a dirt track I used to ride my bike down as a kid is irl, near as damnit. I feel like these almost-the-same-roads often appear in my dreams, but I'm not sure if this is because they felt familiar last night because they were so close to irl, or because I actually have dreamt them before.

I used to have a couple of recurring topographical dreams as a kid and young teenager: in one I was in what I can only describe as a big junkyard, with a flat passage / causeway / alley through the middle and loads of junk on either side (the junk was always indeterminate / unidentifiable, like it was toys and cars and furniture covered in junkyard-landscape-patterned blankets). I used to walk through the middle and the landscape would move around me. Sometimes it would be disconcerting and sometimes it would be quite comforting: I think it got more comforting the more I had the dream and started to realise that it was OK, I was in a dream, and almost gained some kind of lucid control over the topography.

The other recurring dream topography was the estate I grew up on, which was modelled after Clovelly in North Devon - lots of white house and cobbled bits and pedestrian areas and hidden garage / parking areas tucked away behind houses and flower beds and little patches of grass with trees on. It won awards when it was designed I think. It's basically a massive retirement home without any staff now though. But I used to dream bits of the estate that didn't exist, and there were specific houses and walkways that would feature in dreams over and over again. I knew they weren't real, and this recognition of unrealness would allow me to also recognise I was in a dream, after I'd had dreams in this topography a few times.

These weird dream topographies are almost weirder for not being that weird: my dreams (the ones I remember, anyway) are almost like the anti-Gilliam or anti-Gondry, they don't telegraph the fact that they're dreams by being wacky or outlandish. Maybe this is evidence that I'm not very imaginitive!

Interestingly I don't think I've ever dreamt fake topographies of the city I live in now, only ever the town I grew up in. I guess the landscapes of childhood get writ large in the subconscious.

Tell me about your weird dream topographies.

There's definitely places in my childhood that reoccur in my dreams in strange forms. We had a small stream at the end of my garden (which was prosaically and realistically called "the ditch", with a scrubland bank on the other side which led up to the local non-league football ground. That appears frequently, and not too weirdly altered, the ditch is often larger and fuller than it ever was and the bank is a lot bigger and more overgrown. We played there all the time so it's not surprising I dream about it, slightly less explicable are the dreams about a shopping centre and the road you had to cross to get to it, it was a route I took a lot but it doesn't feel more significant than any other parts of town I would just as frequently walk to. In my dreams the shopping centre is larger, there's often a covered walkway that goes almost all the way back to my house, and the road system has developed needless flyovers.

Ishiguro's The Unconsoled is great about this kind of topography and other dream signifiers. At one point he goes on a long car journey from his hotel to a dinner where he has to give a talk. After the talk (in the middle of which his dressing gown falls open, revealing he's naked) he goes through a door and realises he's right back in the hotel.

There was (still is) a pond at the end of a field near where I grew up that we both prosaically and ambitiously referred to as 'the swamp'. Prosaic because, well, it was dirty as fuck, and ambitiously because it was tiny. 'The ditch' would have been more appropriate.

I have a memory of 'the swamp' freezing over one winter, and my (by 9 years) elder brother encouraging me (aged 3? 4? 5?) to walk across the ice, and the ice breaking and me falling in, which i suspect may be a dream, as no one else recalls it, and I'm pretty sure it would have been as big a deal as the time same elder brother hit other (even) elder brother over head with a 6-iron (aged 2 and 4).

I often dream that Hitchin town is roughly three times bigger than it is, with a tram system that takes me to various parts of the town centre which I'm always baffled at never having visited before. I dreamt that Windmill hill (the large bit of grass over looking the town) was much bigger, with a number of houses and other buildings scattered around it.

on a very similar note, since I've been frequently going to London with work I've been dreaming that Hull has a tube. I could probably draw the map.

Do it! Draw the map!

Ah, the dreams where the town you live in has always had a whole extra district with exciting shops in which you regret never visiting before. I have those every so often. When I first moved to my current place (within walking distance of work) I kept dreaming about the walk home with various features it doesn't really have - a cluster of old-fashioned bric-a-brac shops and cafés halfway home, a giant concrete overpass most of the way home which sometimes backed onto a concrete block of flats which turned out to be where I "lived".

Apart from those the outside terrain of my dreams is quite nondescript, but I'm often in buildings where staircases come off staircases at strange angles, jutting into short landings which turn into multiple more staircases, with other staircases I can't work out how to get to visible, and doors and even windows of all shapes and sizes looking out on the staircases.

I went to school briefly in an extended Tudor manor house and lived for a year at university in what had been a set of Victorian terraced houses which had been knocked together, which I suppose both featured floors at different levels and corridors leading to different staircases rather than one single main staircase, so that's probably where it comes from, but why this feature sticks in my subconscious more than other buildings I've spent longer in I don't know. I used to dream about malfunctioning lifts before the staircases...

The city that a lot of my dreams occur in is vaguely based on Philadelphia, where I lived for two years. Often in the morning, when recalling the previous night's dream, I will suddenly realize that a dream I had several months/years prior took place x blocks/miles in whatever direction relative to the location of the dream I just had (along with this comes a vivid recollection of the dream from several months/years ago which I had completely forgotten in the meantime). I could draw a map showing the locations of at least five recurring dreams.

I also have these recurring travelling-through-the-wilderness dreams that begin with the premise of travelling beyond a certain point in the woods of this park (vaguely based on a real park near the house I grew up in) to arrive in a Narnia/Hyrule type world. There is a weird morphing giant hill that I have to climb early on in the journey (Scik Mouthy's junkyard description reminds me of this place a little bit). After that, there are eventually two swamps, and after the second swamp is the ridiculous ancient temple that I am apparently trying to get to every time I dream of this place. I don't always make it there, I usually wake up first, but it's like an Indiana Jones video game in there. I only dream of this place once or twice a year now, but I feel like I dreamt of it constantly as a child.

I often dream that I'm in a large apartment complex, large shopping/mall complex, or arcology dome (cf sim city 2000).

http://www.clockworkhare.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/sim-city-arcology.jpg

Have you ever lived in something similar (obv not arcology dome), or is it a totally dream-derived construction?

I've lived in lots of apartment buildings but these are generally sprawling - much bigger than anything that could ever exist. I guess what happens is that I need to go to lots of places in my dreams, but they end up all being self-contained. So I'll never go outside, just from place to place in this superlarge construction/complex. (What I do there differs depending on the dream.)

Thinking about this, I haven't really had vivid dreams in quite awhile. I'm not sure whether I should blame the baby (it could be that having my sleep frequently interrupted at night has made it difficult to dream vivid) or possibly pharmaceuticals.

wkiw arcology dreamscape. I have a recurring one in which I'm in some kind of stately home, there are lots of different parts of the building and lots of different staircases, I know that I have to take one particular staircase that leads towards a part of the building that contains some awful nameless horror. I have no need or desire to confront this horror, that is simply the way I must go and as I get nearer my feelings mount from simple anxiety to sheer terror. But there is never any climax or confrontation. I don't know where this fear could have sprung from.

There's also the one about having to go through a door that is far smaller than I could possibly fit through. Also terrifying. Obvious but ridiculous psychological explanation: recollection of BIRTH TRAUMA.

If I have a flying dream, no matter where the flight starts, it will always end with me flying west along the coast of southern Ardnamurchan, towards the house (http://goo.gl/maps/9WvP8) my spinter great-aunts lived in from the early 1900s to about 1980. I can take off from Hong Kong or Circencester or wherever (always somewhere I have been before, misremembered probably but never imaginary) and pretty soon the flight is over peaty moorland and rocky shore and then I am overshooting my great aunt's house and landing heavily in a flat, rutted field just to the west of the house (this field is imaginary, as after the house there is, in real life, a cliff). Every time I fly, without fail.

I often wake from dreams feeling that I've dreamt about the place before, but I can never quite work out whether I really have or if the feeling of deja vu is as imaginary as the dream itself.

In the small market town I lived in until age 10 there was a grassy slope with a footpath through it between our road and the centre of the town. I've just looked on Streetview and it's actually quite short and walled-in, but in my childhood mind it was a vast and quite steep open space, and I would dream I was flying and it stretched out under me in a patchwork of non-grassy colours, pinks and purples and (post-merge with dog latin's Little Fluffy Dreamclouds)

I've had other dreams with that exaggerated slope in recently; dreams that I'm back in that town and want to get a bus and there is suddenly a very busy bus terminus halfway up it, etc.

I used to have a reoccurring nightmare that took place at the Goodwin house from Sanctuary. I never think of that novel much, but it haunted me in my dreams for years.

Do it! Draw the map!

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Friday, 19 October 2012 12:19 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

someone else has beaten me to it.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2494/4045353945_ed2ce47bfa_z.jpg

and... he's got it damn close to the hull tube of my dreams, main difference is that the yellow line hasn't yet been built, the black line goes further north - ie Blundells Corner - Polar Bear - Fair/ KC stadium - Springhead - Willerby , and the green line is not crossriver, it's spur of the black line that has an extra coupla stops for Newland so Polar Bear - Pearson Park - Newland - Salmon grove - etc.

Awesome. I'm psyched too that there's a place in Hull called Polar Bear.

My dreams more often than not take place at the house I grew up in. My parents still live there, but the funny thing is, in my dreams I'm often in, or looking out at, the backyard as it was then, which was all open grass and a hills hoist - they built an extension 20 years ago and it hasnt looked that way in forever. But it persists fiercly in all my dreams. Even if people in the dreams are current ppl whove never been near my home town or family, we're all in the house in Q'beyan. So strange.

Yes, mine too. I lived less than half my life in that house, but it is the setting for my dreams so often.

i had a dream where i was a james bond super-spy kind of guy (recurring theme in my dreams, and one reason why inception resonated with me so much) but the setting was a totally futuristic megaopolis with cool futurearchetecture. when i saw the korea-of-2347 part of the trailer for cloud atlas i was like "OH SHIT THEY STOLE MY DREAM AND PUT IT IN THE MOOVIES!"

i mean seriously that's exactly what it looked like in my dreams.