Cities of Dreams

On occasion, I have had dreams in which I seemed to be a traveler to a future time and place.

One time, I dreamed I was in an area of rolling mountains. The area was mostly grassy green, and we were on top of a ridge. The slope was rather steep to build on, and the valley below could be prone to flooding or avalanche. On top of the next ridge was another large building like the one we were approaching. I became aware that there was something very strange about this place, that it was real, but I could not tell whether we were in Europe or America. I asked my two guides "What country is this?" and "What year is this?", questions which were met with laughter and disbelief even when I repeated the question, insisting that I was serious. We entered a large single-story building. There was a single entrance to the building, although it was very large and many people lived there. I thought it was something like a longhouse. The entrance opened directly into a large area not unlike a hotel lobby, where various activities were taking place in different corners. For example, in one corner, small children were playing, and being watched and entertained by caretakers, possibly while their parents were away. Children of different ages hung out in another area, and a group of old people were gathered to play chess and cards and chat in another area. I realized that this was not just an apartment-style building, but much more sophisticated. This lobby or social area provided services such as childcare, elderly care, a hangout for interest groups or discussion groups, and even security, since everybody would have to pass through this area to go through to more private living areas.

I don't remember much else about the dream. I half-expected to see elements of the housing design that I had seen start to appear in real designs, but I have seen movement more in the opposite direction: less communal housing and shared communal spaces, more video cameras for security and small or nonexistent shared lobby spaces.

Last night I had another strange dream that was similar. I was awake from 4:05 to at least 4:54, probably due to one of the medications I am taking for pneumonia. The pharmacist had told me it could cause doki-doki, which I took to mean excitement, rapid heartbeat, or something similar. Maybe that caused me to wake up. I had this energy to cycle to the beach and watch the sun rise or something crazy like that. I think the energy was supposed to go to expectoration, not expectation. After I fell asleep again, I was in a dream. I was being given a tour of a place. I knew it was a dream, and that I would be returning from the tour. I was trying to take photos with a cellphone, and take notes to record what I saw. Obviously, when I woke up, these records were gone, but I attempted to take a few notes of what I remembered before the dream eroded away to a trace.

I was in a city. It seemed to be Tokyo. The year may have been 2020 or 2200 or something like that. In the old city, I was being taken around to visit many people. Most interiors had been done completely with bamboo. Interiors looked like a Thai countryside house on the inside. Some of the people I visited seemed to be living in small apartments on small side-streets of the old city. Some of these were clearly very old, and surrounded by older decaying apartment units which were bigger.

Exploring from these side streets, I could see that much of the city was in ruins. It was not the ruins of an earthquake or war, but the ruins of mold, rust, and decay. The buildings looked just like modern buildings only aged 100 years. They were drab, sometimes twisted or warped, appearing leaky and unlivable. Perhaps they were too expensive to tear down and were just abandoned for the time being. The biggest structural problem was probably that many roofs had collapsed. I found the ruins quite picturesque, and was enjoying the atmospheric shadowy spaces among the rusted metal, broken glass, and grimy concrete of this area, taking photographs. People were few in these areas, but friendly, yet slightly curious as to visitors. In some places, the sidewalks along these areas were made of old plywood layered like shingles on a roof. In some places, the plywood had rotted and my foot would go through it into a hole. Underneath, I could see that it was not dirt, but was made of the crushed ruins of old wooden houses.

A few times, in the ruins, I came to spots where there were big steel grid gates, more like a drawbridge or gate that would be dropped in a river or something. You could see through this fenced area to a special area inside. In there was a large cleared area of a few square kilometers. Much of it had been cleared of everything but dirt, and excavated deeper than other areas. It looked cleaned up as if no city had ever been there. Off about a kilometer away, in the background, I could see a big machine working. It was like a car carrier, scaled up to be about 4 times wider, 4 times higher, and longer. It also resembled a combine (harvester) in how it functioned. I called it a city-eater. It converted the ruined city into empty space and materials for building new city. It took in the ruins of the old city at the front, and discharged small amounts of dirt underneath or from the back. Apparently the chopped-up bits of city that it was taking in were sorted into bins inside for re-use. I thought that these machines were human-operated, but while I was watching one, it turned and headed toward me. I thought that it was responding to my staring at it, but it was just coming to the gate where I happened to be. I saw then that it was autonomous, not human-operated, and that it responded to human speech. A guard at the gate met it and left, speaking with it, as it maneuvered down the street toward the port. I followed it to find it there waiting for a ship. Traffic, by the way, was very busy, and consisted of cars, trucks, and bicycles that didn't seem much different than now.

I was able to bring my family there, but we didn't live in a single-family unit like the bamboo-refinished antique apartments of the old city. There was a larger social unit, an intermediate one, that doesn't exist today. Unlike the Work Unit of China, this was like a Living Unit. I think there may have been about a hundred or more of us. We were together in the open air at picnic-tables at the twilight, talking with others. Later, inside, I saw a kitchen area. There was a colored slider-abacus-like device to show when it was your turn to cook. There was room for about 20 people to work, with 4 or 5 rows of counters, with 4 or 5 work stations in each row. Each work space was walled off like a library carrel. These carrels and the walls were made of a plastic or glassy material about 4 to 6 inches thick. Some children were standing up on top of the dividers or trying to help out their dads and moms with cooking chores. There was a nice atmosphere, like a house or casual restaurant more than work. There was a big round metal grill or griddle (teppan) shaped like a barrel, and on top, some kind of gyoza, about 50 of them, were cooking.

Near the cooking area was a shower area. I didn't see any baths, but there were showers for about 20 people at this location, semiprivate. The walls were made of this glassy material that looked like marble or superball-sized pieces of clear glass or plastic, mixed in with some colored pieces of the glass or plastic, had been melded together into semi-translucent walls. There were doors made of this stuff on some showers, which were more like stalls, others were in a more open part of the shower area.

The eating area was near here, too. It seemed a little too crowded and brightly lit. There was picnic-table type seating, i.e. benches and long tables. It all seemed to be indoors, and I don't remember windows in any of these areas, so maybe we were underground.

On waking up, the dream began to evaporate very quickly. I took a few notes to try to save some of it, but most dripped back into the subconscious like water flowing out of a car dredged from a river, or soap bubbles popping.

Update: (20061021): I remembered that "Gunkanjima" -- Hashima Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, possibly the most densely populated place on earth in 1959, and abandoned since 1974, is a good place to see the process of modern high-rise architecture returning to nature, except that you can't really legally go there, so look up some of the online galleries.