architecture

Waking up from a dream two nights ago, I realized the architecture in my dreams is one of the most vivid details I remember. Classrooms, schools, and houses are never the ones I see in daylight, but they appear in dream after dream. When I put them together I see that the dream homes have an area that extends far up or far back. An attic room expands to be as large or larger than the living space downstairs, full of artifacts from two and three generations ago. Or the master bedroom in the back of the house is so far back as to be desert island retreat, with low ceilings, and when reached it is an unbreachable inner sanctum with blue curtains. Those back rooms are among my favorite dream locations.

The dream that prompted this observation two nights ago was a Sunday night dream. Usually these dreams happen before the first day of school in August, or after the winter break, or after spring break, but this was just another Sunday night. I could not find my classroom, and it was raining, and I was being dropped off by my husband and friends from out of town, and I was late. (I am frequently late in my dreams, but I am rarely late when I am not dreaming.) I had no shoes, so I walked barefoot across asphalt and grass and concrete sidewalk anyway, driven by the necessity of being in my classroom when school starts. I walked down long hallways looking for my room. It was the newest part of the school, classrooms with inviting doorways and windows looking out onto the landscaped lawn. I reached what I thought was my room but another teacher's name was on the door. I assumed I was lost and confused. Only later, after I had woken up and re-entered the dream did I realize I was in the right place but my room had been given to another teacher.

If asked, I could give the dimensions of the rooms and doors, describe the windows that looked over the lawn, and show the landscapers the view from the door of my... former... classroom. I could show them how far it is from the classroom door through the hallway to the door that leads to the lawn. The angles of the intersecting hallways. I could show them where I was standing when I showed up, barefoot, with no classroom, ready to teach.