• Mood: waking up

A sense of place, even in a dream

The dream-environment last night -- right up until when my alarm went off, too, apparently -- was a dream version of Salt Lake City. I have never been to any part of Salt Lake City outside of the airport, so I'm not counting on it being accurate, but dreams aren't about accuracy. The entire time I was in the city, it was still under that post-sunset sky glow -- enough for street lamps to be on, and about half of the sky that flat, starless blue-gray of almost-night -- except full night never showed up. I traveled around with family and unknown friends of my family (invented friends of my family! Extras, I guess) to a function at a large hotel that was close to Temple Square, but not obviously close: I wanted to go to the Square but was worried I'd get lost on my own. (Our path into town had skirted the Square, and in fact seemed to be designed to take us through non-obvious corners of the city. Does Salt Lake have twisty alleys? One of those briefly showed up.) So I went off by myself -- through a buffet area with quiet, gently helpful people serving food and Norah Jones's "Come Away With Me" playing on the P.A. -- and sat down to read a write-up about the valley where Salt Lake City was built. It's as if I wanted to know not how to get to where I wanted to go, but why where I wanted to go was where it was, if that makes any sense. The write-up seemed to be trying very hard to say why placement was significant, but not for the reasons told about in the story of the Mormon migration. A sense of place, and of why the people of the religion went there originally, is of course important to that religion; I don't know much about the Church of Mormon, but I know that.

Yes, I'm as surprised as you are that religion was a topic in a dream of mine.

Realizing I was where I was, I also got thinking of my few handy references to Salt Lake, most of which come from Rick Emerson, who moved there in the 1990s for a radio job. He had a decently successful dating life while there -- he met his wife there, and before that he got plenty of (I'll speak euphemistically) company. In fact one time on his show he said "If you can't get laid in Utah, you are not meant to have sex."

But the strongest feeling from the dream was that sense that something was trying hard to show me why that sense of place was and is important. Or that *I* was trying hard to get that sense.

"Welcome to my brain," as my friend s00j says.

Also, there was a dream-diversion, or a dream-digression, I guess, about people going to England to walk through an art installation that was basically a winding path set (carved? No, but the path was lower than the rest of the gym, as if the path was lined with thousands of uniformly-sized boxes) into a large gym's floor, all of the floor covered by black tarps. It was nothing as orderly as a labyrinth, but still contemplative in its way. People would climb a ladder down into the room, then walk the winding path, then get back to the ladder and climb back up. David Letterman was one of the walkers. He was being very serious about it.