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dreams of architectural graffiti
Thursday, March 23 2017
Last night before going to bed, I'd taken another 75 milligram dose of diphenhydramine (benadryl), and yet again I had memorable dreams. This time I dreamed that, while vacationing in Rome for two weeks with Gretchen, I somehow found the spare time to build an elaborate stone building on an abandoned lot near a Roman ruin. The building was of an unusual architectural style, featuring elaborate arches made of large shiny black stones in neo-classical-meets Alien vernacular. I'd somehow built the building completely on the sly, and was delighted to see it had become a tourist attraction, with people walking casually through its hallways sipping cups of coffee from paper cups, completely unaware of its provenance. This dream is a member of a class of similar dreams in which I've built various structures on the sly in various places and then either stood back to enjoy people using them or agonized at their destruction. They all have origins in a room (201) I occupied on the second floor of Oberlin's Harkness Co-op my junior year (1988-1989). I'd half-jokingly thought about secretly adding a south-facing window to that room (which was on the southwest corner but had no windows through its south wall), though my only real attempt at long-term room alteration was leaving some tin foil glued to the wall near the west-facing window with coin embossed into its surface. I'd painted over it with white paint in hopes it wouldn't be noticed, though the alteration didn't survive. I've subsequently had dreams about installing a turret and an elaborate system of solar panels on the Harkness roof, only to watch them fall apart and then be dismantled by authorities. In more recent times, I've had happier dreams about architectural graffiti (if such a term exists). Before the one I'd had last night, I'd had one in which I'd secretly tunneled off the side of a public space located in a basement to build a gloriously organic hallway covered in tile. Such dreams have some grounding in reality: there's that ongoing excavation in the basement of the greenhouse and the elaborate solar deck over the laboratory. But in the dreams I am somehow able to build huge, wildly-complicated spaces single-handedly in the space of a week.
Today I took a recreational 25 milligram dose of amphetamine salts, hoping to maybe apply the resulting focus to some long-procrastinated remote-workplace tasks. But I kept getting distracted by other issues, such as poor database performance on the main web server (which I might have precipitated by doing a database dump).
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