So I had another episode of the same old recurring other apartment dream except this time there was action and some movement in the plot line - has to be good, right? (And yes, I know, hearing about someone else's dream is the most boring thing on earth so unless you have five minutes to waste, stop right here.)
For those with time on their hands, this began years and years ago as the very common, so I've read, dream of opening a door (I said it was boring) in the place where you live and finding a room or rooms that you didn't know existed opening up before you. I cheerfully interpreted this as my being ready for new interests and possibilities that I had formerly shut myself off from.
The door was never locked and always opened easily, thank God. (All I can suggest here, if you have more than five minutes to waste, is to google "dream interpretation opening doors undiscovered rooms" or some variation thereof.)
The newly discovered rooms were always painted white and were completely empty. I don't remember ever doing anything while I was inside them - that was the dream: open previously un-noticed door, find self in unfurnished white-painted room or rooms.
Somewhere along the decades, when I was in real life living in an apartment in the East Eighties in Manhattan, this dream morphed into one of having another apartment up in the Nineties, along with the one I lived in. I think I was paying some kind of minimal rent for it (as I was for my real life apartment) but no one ever asked me for it (NOT as it was for my real life apartment).
I didn't go there very often, but I always knew it was there for me to visit whenever I wanted. It was in an industrial district, which doesn't describe the real life East Nineties, and to get to the apartment I had to go up a twisty, difficult to ascend staircase (and if you think I'm going anywhere near that one in something other people can read, you can think again, as we used to say in England).
It was always a bit decrepit and dilapidated, and sometimes on my visits I'd find out the landlord was renting out other apartments in the building whose tenants used to have to go through my apartment to get to theirs or vice versa. I never lived in it, just went by to visit every now and again, and when I left it to go back to where I lived in real life, it was always through dark unfamiliar streets and alley ways.
And that was it for a long long time. I don't know how often I had the dream - a couple of times a year? - but all I ever did in it was go and look at the apartment and then leave and go back home.
That was while I was living in New York in the same real life apartment, and the dream didn't change over the past eleven years when I began to come out to New Mexico a couple of times a year and then lived in Cambridge for a year and a half. This past June I gave up the apartment I lived in for thirty-eight years and moved out to New Mexico, where I've spend the past eight months, and lo and behold, last night when the dream returned it was different.
This time, instead of being on top of a storefront, the apartment was in a big old rectangular building on 116th Street. (I know it was 116th Street because I went looking for the nearest subway station and that was it.) The landlord let me in (the landlord always lets me in) and the apartment was huge - great big squarish rooms leading one into the other with no separation (How do I know it wasn't one big room then, you ask. Hey, it was a dream.) and was in terrible shape.
Big dusty old curtains hung from the ceiling and I started pulling them down, and as each one came down there was another behind it, and when I pulled that one down there was yet another and so on and so on until I finally got them all on the floor and the walls and ceiling were shown to be of dark wormy wood with all kinds of holes and crevasses that I knew creepy-crawlies lived in. (OK, so I stained the old school desk two days in a row.)
At this point I must have told the landlord that I would be coming back the next day and that he would have to have the apartment restored and renovated by then, not exactly characteristic behavior, and this was the point at which I discovered it was at 116th Street. The streets were thronged with people and to avoid them I hugged the side of the building. Two men - both what would once have been described as bums - came lurching out of nowhere and said something to me but I ignored them and scurried along to the subway station.
Next, I was back in the apartment and it was spotlessly clean, painted white and had another tenant - an Asian woman with a young baby, living in the room farthest from the front door. She was very friendly and showed me how to use the television. When she pressed a special button on the remote, the screen doubled itself in size by expanding downwards outside of the perimeter of the monitor. Very clever.
She gave me a tour of the apartment and opened a door into what I thought was going to be a bathroom but turned out to be a bedroom (here we go again) almost completely filled with a double bed with a man and a woman sitting up in it reading (!). She must have closed the door again as that was the one and only appearance they made.
It then begins to get very vague, with my only clear remembrance being of a cupboard filled with dozens and dozens of variously sized little drawers, all painted white. (I did yesterday, in real life, look at a small red plastic chest that was all made up of little tiny drawers, and thought briefly of buying it so I could further organize my screw connection, if that means anything.)
Then I was outside in the snow because my tearing down the curtains had exposed windows and doors and only as I write this do I remember that the subway ran right through the far end of the apartment, and on that note it must be time to end this account.
That's an awful lot of action after nothing for twenty years. I doubt that I'm going to live to be 87, so hope the next plot development doesn't take that long.
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