What a day. Busy and exciting work left no time for blogging and barely any for lunch, though I managed to shoehorn in a supa-sweaty run. Thanks to all those commenting on my blog—for a while I felt like I was shouting into the wind.
My dream this morning was interrupted (blast!) by the alarm, but it was a real winner. For years I’ve dreamt of vast decrepit Victorian mansions, with rooms filled with dust and peeling wallpaper, fireplaces long dark, and intertwining rickety staircases and balconies. Those dreams usually ended with me running in slow-mo and screaming. But since starting a career in architecture and buying a house, this stock horror dream has shifted into something wonderful. Now the house is old and decrepit, but I OWN it. Wait, that sounds even scarier. No, but yeah! And somehow I’ve bought it for a song ($500 in one dream) and haven’t even been able to explore the whole thing. This morning’s dream had me visiting friends who had bought a huge rambling mansion. They had converted some of the rooms into mini-apartments, and the previous owners had left some stuff untouched since the 1890s, and updated other areas with awful 70s carpeting. There were entire full kitchens in several parts of the house, huge servants quarters. I tried to point out the hidden potential of this house to my friend.
“Look, they even put shag carpeting on the walls over the fireplace! Gag me with a spoon! But there’s real mahogany paneling behind it, holy crap.”
We turned a corner to find a huge stone fireplace filled with a murphy bed.
“What if we fold this down?”
Behind it was a fireplace as deep as a room, with, wait for it, several more fireplaces facing into it. Hoo man. I don’t know why, but the idea of multiple fireplaces in one home gets me all shivery and hand-flappy. In my dreams the fireplaces are often side-by-side, firewood consumption be damned. In this fireplace room were marble countertops and a couple old standing mixers.
“Just imagine,” I told my friend, “I could have like FIVE loaves of bread going at once in here! Do you realize what you have?!”
Well, it wasn’t all great. There were a bunch of old aquariums in there, one filled with huge black scorpions the size of lobsters, another with lobsters the size of dolphins. And it seemed they had been neglected since the original owners abandoned the house, oh, ninety years ago, so they were pretty ornery. I tried to hint at this to my wife, who had her face pressed up against the glass, watching them wave their stinger tails. She thought I was being quote-unquote reactionary. Also, there were large fish floating through the air. At this point the alarm went off.
Man, it doesn’t sound that great, but trust me, it was totally…awesome. And there were at least five fireplaces inside another giant fireplace! Don’t you think that’s cool?! [sigh]
As my good friend Gene said when I told him my dreams, “You’re f#$^ed up, dude.”
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Too much smoke from all them durned fireplaces, but that gigantor lobster sounded like a mighty fine dinner for 100! You're just weird dude.