[Dream] The garden afar and the city of drones [May 6th]

I dreamt I was travelling through a large forest-like garden with a friend. Within the garden was a palace very similar to Versailles. Though I was familiar with the garden, we kept getting turned around and couldn't find our way to the palace.

At some point, the dream pulled back and I saw a larger geography: the garden was a green oasis far off, and I was near a mound city, like a mountain made of buildings set atop flat fields of gold and green, near a wide river or ocean. Inside the city was labyrinthine, both its streets and its buildings, which seemed less constructed than organically grown from stone and/or adobe--all curved walls and twisting tunnels. I met Mark and we briefly fell into discussion as if we were still an item, until he said something paternalistic and I remembered that we had broken up and I didn't have to put up with that crap. I left for home.

I must have gotten home, though I don't remember it in the dream. What I remember is being back in the city with my cousin' family, leading them around on a nice tourist-type vacation. The dream was briefly interrupted by clips of a heavy-set tour guide with a blond bob, an unfunny Rebel Wilson, offering travel information and tips which were always wrong or irrelevant. I tried pointing out areas I had visited which I thought the family might enjoy, but we kept getting turned around, mostly as they ignored my lead and dragged me off on tangents.

In the city, houses weren't houses as much as they were rooms that opened on each other, so that sometimes we were passing through someone's living room to get to the next destination, and a window might open on a bathtub formed from the solid rock. The cousin's brother-in-law found it might funny.

At some point, I was in a large open space looking at an industrial building--a factory or a school, in the Pink Floydiest sense of the thing, and odd for the more organic mound city. High up in the air, some kind of performance art piece was underway. Two giant metal cages were attached to a shared axle, so that they could move around its center point and each other, but still stay mostly level if the people inside were careful.

In the right cage stood some citizens, regular folks in World War era dress, arranged to keep the cage more or less balanced. In the left cage, which swung wildly and kept the two cages circling each other up and down, were soldiers, including Lord Kitchener with his giant menacing moustache and an eerie child general in a long grey coat. When the cave swung over the citizens' cage, the child general would throw himself into their cage screaming--orders, maybe, or just threats. As the soldiers' cage swung down, he would jump back in. This reckless motion required the citizens to remain motionless simply to keep the system stable and everyone inside from falling out.

I was back inside the anthill city, now with some of the citizens, though the family wasn't too far away. A motley group of about five soldiers, including his lordship and the child general, had come inside and were intimidating some of the city's inhabitants and demanding drink, food, attention, fear. One of the citizens handed me a hand-held telescope and gave me a small nudge. I took the hint and looked at the group through the viewer, and saw them for what they were: monstrous creatures not of this world and only pretending to be human. The child general realized I could see what he really was and screeched.

Telescope in hand, I took off running, intending not only to escape but to lead the creatures away from the citizens and my relatives. I wound through rooms and tunnels heading downward, but somehow I got turned around, lost in some long unused tunnels with few windows, little light, and crumbling stone work. I knew I must be in some very low areas, since the tunnels were tighter and doors were opening onto closets rather than rooms proper, but I couldn't remember which way was out. Then I remembered that I was still trying to lead my friend to the garden, and man, was I botching this big time....

Notes, details and explanations
#1. I recognized the garden we were travelling through as part of the Missouri Botanical Garden, at once the maze-like English Woodland Garden and the tree-lined path along the lake of the Japanese Garden. (This isn't as strange as it sounds--the path in question borders the English Woodland Garden.) None of the Garden's buildings resemble the palace of Versailles, but the dream palace felt like a destination in its own right, and reminds me of the Garden's main entrance. I didn't see the dream friend, but in waking life I have recently made arrangements to visit the Garden with Tina, after earlier plans failed to gel. Put the two together, and the end where I'm trying to lead this friend to the garden, and this reads to me like a low-grade worry that arrangements will fall through and we won't make our get-together after all.

#2. The mound city is many things rolled up into one symbol. First, it's very much St. Louis: one of the city's former nicknames is Mound City, in reference to the burial mounds which used to dot the landscape, but more than that, it's a very hilly city with the Great Plains not far off (in the imagination, at least) to the west. Second, it's very much Cork: though nothing geographically matches, the vertical terrain of the dream is very much the city's, well, vertical terrain. (Why does Cork show up in my dreams more than a decade late? Beats me.)

At the same time, however, the city is also several dream cities: it's the dream seaside city where I watched a night-time spectacular with floodlights and elephants. It's the anthill city that resembled downtown St. Louis. It's the mountain city on the plains, where travellers sought refuge from zombies but something more evil lurked below, and I tried to turn off the movie before it could get me. [Links for those when I'm more awake. Urgh.]

An iconic location coming together from disparate dream elements, or just one weird dream? Don't know just yet.

#3. Poor Mark. I think he was only dragged into the dream because it was kind-of-Cork, and because I was peeling veggies yesterday and had a sudden memory of him nagging me about how I held the knife. Goddamn, that was annoying.

#4. My cousin's son is graduating high school this week, and I was invited to the ceremony. I'm conflicted: on the one hand, I'm swamped with work, and the family is loud and boisterous and takes a lot out of me, and I dislike attending formal events that require me to wear actual pants. On the other hand, none of them came to my graduation and I know that bothered the hell out of my mother. On the third hand (eek!), do I really care about pissing them off? Do I have enough energy after caring about being buried under work? Meh. It's a conundrum.

The loss of privacy in the dream city, the casual invasiveness of the relatives, the constant interruptions and the flustered feeling of not being able to find my way around because I was being dragged off-track, sounds a lot like dread at spending time with my relatives.

#5. Is that 'performance art' thing one giant metaphor for war and/or government? I don't know. I don't think I'm that much of a revolutionary. Too much Pink Floyd, maybe? Lord Kitchener was an odd touch, a fully-overblown symbol not quite Pythonesque but definitely absurd. The child general was more menacing, but with an odd 'too-fictional' quality, like something from anime, or an overt and anvilicious symbol.

#6. The telescope is in waking life a small metal LED flashlight belonging to my mother. It bears a strong resemblance to a telescope; my nephew and his friends used to pretend it was one when they played games. It amuses me that, in the dream, it casts light on the true nature of the soldiers. (Har.)

#7. Over and over in the dream, I'm lost or turned around. Gee, what could that mean? Fwah.