(Nice Dream)

A candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper "Go to sleep, everything is alright". I close my eyes, then I drift away into the magic night. I softly say a silent prayer like dreamers do, then I fall asleep to dreams, my dreams of you.
In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you. In dreams, you're mine all of the time. We're together in dreams, in dreams.But just before the dawn I awake and find you gone. I can't help it, I can't help it if I cry. I remember that you said goodbye.
It's too bad that all these things can only happen in my dreams, only in dreams, in beautiful dreams.

Impossible Cities II : Coimbra

Somewhere halfway across the globe, there is a girl - let's call her M - who for a period of time dwelled deep inside my heart. And, because life being life, and things like distance and other complicated matters being what they are, it all really amounted to not much more than a collection of conversations on the telephone, maybe some emails swapped, and suchlike. But as I think of her I'm struck about how much I can really recall now about her - I guess I still have the image of her etched in my imagination, and perhaps echoes of her voice may yet flicker flleetingly in the wind -  yet, for all that everything else seems uncertain in my mind. Even where she comes from I can't quite for sure determine whether or not I misremember. I am, though, choosing not to err on the side of caution and think that she does come from the city of which I shall be writing, because this impossible version of the city of Coimbra is a fairly new addition to my menagerie of vast urban sprawls.

I include M here because not only am I of a mind that this is where she comes from in real life, but because I recently had a dream where I was in Coimbra looking for her. I know not why, what drove me to go there, but in the dream I found myself in the city trying to figure out where I could find her. If memory serves me right, I was not alone in this quest of mine, there were maybe two or three other companions alongside me. I can vaguely recall that these might have been people culled from my waking world, though none with whom I've had much contact these past few years. In this pursuit of mine, I had nothing to go on but the vague information that M either had or managed or worked at a bar somewhere, but quite where I did not know.

As with so many cities, this one had an older part of the town and a more modern side as well. Bear in mind that in no way, shape or form does the city I dreamt of  mirror the real one, no one part of its dream aspect correlates to the waking city. So, on I go on the pursuance of a dream M, whom I never met (even in dreams I know this) and do not really know how she looks like. Maybe I have a plan, maybe I don't. Maybe I go from bar to bar asking people if they know of her. Now, at this I'm leery of my memory, because I can't remember in which order I went from one side of the city to the other. But maybe because I have the memory of the old town still firmly in me, let's begin there. 

It's old, but not in a real-life old kind of way. What do I mean by this? It's certainly medieval, but medieval in a north-european kind of way, if north europe had been in the south of europe. What I mean is that it was located on the shore, and huge docks sprawled for miles on end, long boats swaying gentlly in the river waters as they lay moored. There are wooden buildings, tall, very tall and very wide - these would be mainly for food stores as well as assorted shops that dealt with commerce, and mongery and smithery too. I feel I had arrived here by boat, though that voyage is nothing I'd dreamt of. As I walk through these tall, wooden structures, I see that not very far from where I am there seems to be some raucous noise coming from some other buildings just up a sloping path. Feeling that this would be as good a place as any other to start my inquiries, I make my own way there.

Yet when I get there sufficient time had elapsed that by then everything had closed. Was it that much farther than I'd imagined? And it was either very late or very early in the morning, depending on which way you choose to look at it. As the last people vacated the - apparently - only actual bar, I asked them if they knew of M, and one of the girls there gave me a mysterious sort of answer, noncommittal as if to provide some form of plausible deniability, which left me thinking if whether or not this girl was M herself. But not feeling confident enough, I made no move or reply, and the group left. And so did I make my exit, pondering the crafty wording of what the girl said, trying to decide if she'd told me some secret I needed to decrypt or not.

With this, the dream moves to the newer, modern, almost futuristic part of the city, and what elapsed between moving twist these locations I cannot guess, but I'd given up on finding M, for whatever reason. Where I stood now was an immense plaza with a titanic building right at the center of it, and this was a building seemingly made of the shiniest glass, supported by trusses and girders that had a sheen of their own as well, and it commanded the surrounding the plaza as if the greatest diamond in creation had been placed there by some cosmic giant's hand. What mighty kings or what unfathomable wealths might dwell there? In my mind I saw this building as having such a noble purpose that I could have never imagine this to be the bus terminal. And, bringing a common and re-ocurring theme from these kind of dreams, I yearned to go home, I yearned it ardently. If indeed I did or not, I cannot say now.

The city of Coimbra is not one of which I have pleasant memories of, in all honesty I can say I do not like it, nor do I think I ever shall. I see no beauty or interest in it, and in the multiple times I've been there I could not come to get what makes it and its people tick. It's just not for me.

Impossible cities I : London

I dream of impossible cities, cities that could not, should not, ever exist. They are so vast in scope, so at once futuristic and at the same time ancient, that no city planning in any universe could ever come to bear them.

One of these impossible cities I dream of is a London to which I arrive in early winter, usually. I arrive penniless and with naught but what I wear and carry with me. Ahead, lies a life filled with the dread of possible penury, but in those dreams I always find some spartan, victorian cubicle in which I abide. How I pay for it, I cannot imagine, for in those dreams I am wholly destitute, and with no employment in sight. There's always the hope of something coming along, but I am yet to see it materialize.

It's a vast city I dream of, its streets largely dissimilar from the real-life one; very wide and spatious, these streets are lined with gargantuan shops of every kind, as well as clusters of these very shops centered in either buildings - each also impossibly large and much bigger on the inside than would otherwise appear. - or ramshackle markets. There is a bookstore that exists only in my dreams, and it's an enormous sort of store, very high ceilinged and with the promise of gardens seen through windows that intersperse its many divisions. The bookshelves themselves are stacked high, and filled deep with books - picture a library that encompassed every book that ever and never was, but oh, here you could purchase any of them you wished. And in this very bookstore I find myself staring longingly at shelf upon shelf of books I want, but cannot possibly afford, at least not then - and maybe, just maybe, in the dream not ever. This directly correlates to a point in time in my life where I moved to London, in 2005, and found myself in a situation not entirely different from this one. As I stand and look at those books that seem ever so distant, I find in me a resolute will to somehow return there and bring them all home, and I leave, elated in this fleeting moment, before taking to the streets. 

Often I then return to that small and sparse room, taking a number of different buses to get there. Do I have a bus pass? Is travel free? I do not know. Eventually, I am far from the city proper, in some suburban distopia, and I hurry to where the supermarket is - yet another gigantic, sprawling place housed in a far more colossal structure, hurrying to get there just before it closes so that I can shop for food, though I never know how I pay for it. 

But some other times I give up and decide to fly back home, and I take to the immense and far-reaching network of trains and subways that somehow weave a tangled web across the whole of the city. The stations proper are yet another example of impossible scope in size, dug deep down far beneath the ground, and to which you get to down through a signifcant number of stairs, tunnels and corridors. And yet, every so often you'll find a fairly non-descript exit that will leave you somewhere out in the city, just in reach of any other means of transportation one might desire.

It is through this web of transports, motorways and tramlines that I ultimately arrive at the airport, and again - I arrive there with no money, no means to pay for a ticket to get home. I am nurturing the hope that somehow I can board a plane and return home. I don't know how, but I have to, I must. And the strangest thing happens : I remember I still have my home country bank acoount, with maybe sufficient funds in it for me to get a ticket. Had I never remembered, up till then, that I had this option? Or did I leave it as some sort of desperate last resort? 

I finally procure the ticket and must now make my way to some far-off terminal, of course miles away from where I am, and with the shortest window for me to get there. I manage, just in time, jumping down stairs and fying through escalators, weaving through the throngs that swim upstream of me, reaching finally my intended destination. I do, however, have to run my way through the tarmac to the plane, and this being an airport that only exists in my dreams, of course has military planes flying to and from it as well, because why wouldn't they? And just next to some vast flying fortress of war lies a miniature of a plane, as if someone had taken a regualr sized plane and shrunk it so that only half a dozen people or so fit in it. If in the beginning I feel in me the trepidation of stepping into this ersatz craft, as I sit I feel relief washing over me, and I feel my eyelids, heavy as heavy can be, begin to close and I drift away to sleep. And I dream...

And then, then I wake up.