Note: This post, while an earnest reconstruction of my dream life, is also a tribute to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (which I would like to reread) and to Inception, which I have been intending to watch again for some time.

Since having the aneurysm three years ago, I have rarely dreamed at night. Over the last year, the capacity has slowly and irregularly been returning to me. I've had a few dreams where I can walk, and am aware there is something special in that.

The dreams I've had tend to be brief, and come in snatches, but they are increasing in both steadiness and frequency. This morning I dreamed about a female announcer of men's basketball (me more or less in this context) who got into the work through her friend Florence, a sort of dark-haired Doris Burke (if you know who that is) who played women's college basketball. Where that came from, I don't know. Perhaps a conversation between Lauren Groff and another lady writer about her book Matrix. This book centers around Marie de France, and I didn't love it. Anything I create about Marie in the future will be much different. I'm also a man. But the point is they were two women commentators, speaking about women thriving in a male world. That's likely where it came from.

Anyway, like I said: more dreams. For better or worse.

I've only had one recurring dream, and it's not so much a recurring dream as a recurring context for a dream, and I only know it's recurring thanks to memories of previous dreams. A highly unsatisfactory situation for generating certainty. Nevertheless, I distinctly remember having several similar dreams in the same place. They are all dreams in which I am traveling laboriously, usually at night, by public transportation or on foot through a city. The geography is suspiciously familiar.

I am going to draw you a map, although how many dreams I have had in this place is difficult to say. I have a memory, as of multiple layers of experience, both being in these areas separately and passing between them, which gives me confidence that I am essentially describing a single place.

Listen while you read:

The North

To the right, and generally north, is a neighborhood of steep moonlit hills and beautiful raised gardens, raised against the steepness of the hill and containing many ferns, their shadows standing out against the street lights. Many vines and creepers come in still waves over their fences, hinting at the lush darkness within them.

This is an area where one doesn't take public transportation, either driving (parking is difficult) or walking down the moonlit streets, probably looking for your parked car among the jammed crowd of vehicles along each steep block.

"It's not on this one, it must be on the next…" Looking down to where the hill falls away towards the sea under the moon, the next block is steep enough that it disappears. The end of the block, with its lit quiet street, looks like a gleaming river on a cliff edge.

The silver and pale purple of the street lamp (as much as the moonlight, realistically) glints on the wheel wells—sleek, muscular, ready to spring—of the green Jaguar parked with its wheels curbed sharply into the sidewalk at the base of the block. A plant, similar in color and surely from the same jungle, is in front of the house next to you, in a private niche beside a concrete urn with an appropriate amount of moss on it. The plant's leaves are heart-shaped and under-shadowed by a darker purple than the street lights. Its skin is smooth and cool like a boa's. This area of town is perfect and a little hostile to outsiders.

At the top of the hill stands what would normally be a conventionally pleasant park had not its architect, perhaps accidentally, designed it vertically rather than horizontally.

The first time I visited the space in my dreams, it was more of a normal park that I remembered as being very steep. The second time, my mind simply jumped to the end, as it were, and gave me the south half of the park vertically, and I had to sit down at the top for vertiginous feelings. It was like sitting in an eagle's eyrie overlooking the roofs to the south.

The Transportation District

To the south of the perfect-jungle-steep-hill-district, although not really accessible from it as the first area is a virtual island, is the city's transportation district.

The first time I made it to this part of town it was daytime, fairly unique among my dream experiences of this place. I went to a streetcar that stood among a spider's web of tracks going in all directions.

When a visitor comes to this area, thoughts about time and schedules predominate.

The second time I was there it was the station of an underground line. I was trying to get to the airport. Confusingly, though I was underground, the environment most closely resembled an aboveground train station with a big changing notice board of times and schedules and light coming in from above through the tinted glass partial dome of a roof.

Regardless of whether it appears above or below ground, the huge ravine through which the main tracks run gouges the city in two. The transportation district is not a pleasant place to be. You are always in a rush. Always calculating how each thing you do will impact the times you can do other things. Here nothing is fixed, but far from being relaxing, the flexibility just gets bundled into anxiety about every other timeline.

As you look up into the vast grey reaches above you toward the ceiling, you see pigeons are flying in through part of the glass dome that's been left open. They crisscross the echoing concrete space, messily, on the wing. As you glance back down and through a cat's cradle of pigeon trajectories, your eyes hit the departure board. It tilts crazily and all the times and places slide like beads on an abacus, to be added into your thoughts about another place... and you're calculating and calculating and then you are somewhere else.

The East

The third district of the city visited by us is to the east and below the second. It is night there on each occasion. It's darker here, perhaps because the moonlight doesn't reach down to have the same inspirational influence on the street lights here, which are sickly and yellow.

Arriving here at night from the transportation district, one feels already tired yet at the same time exhilarated because there is so much happening here.

We are in a place where there is a row of heavy brick buildings in rows. After passing through the narrow width of one building in the sequence, you enter and quickly pass through another. A small group of people is gathering across a wide expanse of blacktop. They are part of a theater performance you are to be involved in. The east is the place where things are always happening, and where things are also always expiring. You will need to move continuously not to find yourself constantly arriving at the ashes of fires, at events that only just ended. But if you keep moving, it's a whirlwind that constantly catches you up before spitting you towards what is probably the next thing, if only you can recognize it in time.

Elsewhere, on the dark streets, you get out of a car. It's raining. A show you are attending is about to start.

The last time you were in this region you were hurriedly, almost furtively passing from the higher ground to the north along the main thoroughfare into the east, passing through the bookshops, the small theaters, the emporiums for knickknacks descending in a sequence of brutal concrete terraces as you get lower and lower, closer to the chaotic nighttime heart of the east.

Now you are at the bottom at the place where all the buses from the transportation district unload. Presumably they also accept passengers going the other way, heading back. A wind, from that district as it were, hits your face. You think of how late it is, or rather early, and of how far you must go to get home. How many bus changes you will have to make. Your entire body, particularly your legs, which you are not used to using, are exhausted.

The South

Suddenly, off to the right you see a great freeway-type street, winding down the hill from the west and south. It is like a great river winding down the hill to meet you, empty under its street lights.

You haven't visited the southern district very often. Once when you were here before, you were looking for an obscure house on an obscure street off of one of these rivers.

The streets are like backwaters to them; many are small and hard to find. Running to quickly be extinguished against the shoulders of their gardened and steep irregular hills.

The streets that survive and continue curve down the hills and run like smaller versions of the freeway rivers to debouch in dark, obscure intersections in unexpected places further down the hill.

The moonlight shines again in the southern district, all the stronger for having been blocked out in the east. The white walls of a large house at the end of a cul-de-sac (the house you were looking for, where you were once a guest) stand out brilliantly. There, pale plaster surfaces provide the field for the shadow play of plants from the garden, spiky-leaved and broad-flowered. A delicate army of strange forms leads up to the dark blankness of the big window overlooking the bay below, to the east under the moon. Once, that window was full of light and the house a place of friendship and laughter, performances, and lively discussion. Now it is empty and dark, transforming all outsiders who would look into it to shades and mere reflections only.

Now you are walking alone along that empty, moonlit, freeway river. If no one is driving along this road, then what are the chances of a bus, which comes here rarely at the best of times? You may have to walk all the way to the transportation district or even all the way home to the west. A wind comes up, light and warm from the east; it ruffles your shirt. You no longer feel tired... And, after all, you've got all night!

End Note

This map of events and dream space covers in its four sections three quadrants of a circle, plus the center. I remember my feeling of excitement when I realized first that I had had dreams since my aneurysm, that the geography was consistent from dream to dream, and that the place was so clearly a version of San Francisco. It is perhaps unsurprising that one's dreams should be in a place one knows. Indeed, how else could it be? Nevertheless, I was very excited when I realized this and the idea of writing this piece took shape.

It will be noticed that the missing quadrant of the map is the west. That I really don't seem to have dreams that take place here is either deeply strange or perfectly fitting, given that the great majority of my waking life, with hiatuses in Istanbul, Santa Fe, Boston, and Chicago, has taken place there. The fact that it is excluded is, as I've said, not something I have had to manufacture, and perhaps indicates the underlying impulse behind these dreams: a need to explore in my immobility, but also to experience again, as I have been doing with novels, movies, and history while I am awake.

Writing about dreams has been an extremely odd experience, maybe only really possible if, as in this case, one gives oneself permission to invent. What makes it so strange is the permeability and changeability of what constitutes the "facts" of a dream. Their construction reminds me of the blockade Mr. Norrell creates for the British navy in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Ships made of rain. Dreams are essentially made of thought, and so it is a very slippery thing (indeed a dangerous one to any idea of the "original" fabric of a dream) to think about them. Not only do they dissolve like a ball of yarn when you dig into them, but they are also capable of apparently infinite expansion, like the Homeric voice in Auerbach's account of ancient literature. As a result, it can be difficult to keep track of what I've actually dreamed versus invented here. Of course, why it should matter is another question. I think it would spoil whatever value this piece has to spend time on this aspect, so I will not. Thank you for reading!

Map Key

North:

• Pacific Heights, parts of North Beach by Coit Tower, above Chestnut Center (transportation), upper Market, Divisadero, Castro, Van Ness, Geary, West Portal and Forest Hill stations

East:

• Upper Mission, south of Market, Fort Mason, Chinatown, Upper Columbus, Financial District

• Potrero Hill, Diamond Heights, Glen Park

Note on the Art

The accompanying art is a drawing I made as a poster many years ago, for a short film (which was never properly finished) that I made with Joshua Windmiller, my friend who helps me edit all my writing. It was called "Smoke Plus Mirrors." I have included it because the stories, if you will forgive the term being applied here, are quite similar. I even recalled and rediscovered a piece of music that inspired me during the writing of the film, "Romanian Fantasy" by the Klezmatics, and have used it here.

The film involves a man, played by Josh, who lives a dissatisfied life alone in a psychologically oppressive, isolating city. He escapes every night into a mirror where he finds love and happiness, yet remains unsatisfied by that love's evidently illusory, limited, proscribed nature. I have a thought, when I achieve my goal of becoming a creator of animated films as I recover in this condition, of somehow combining the ideas of "City Visible at Night" with the old "Smoke Plus Mirrors" to create an animated film. Your thoughts, dear readers?

Note on the Use of the Second Person

This is, in part, a homage to my actual favorite Italo Calvino. Not Invisible Cities, but If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. I also feel it's appropriate for describing the dream state, where the "I" often feels like a "you." This will be cleaned up and made consistent in a second draft. I am, again, very curious what readers think of this. Leave a comment or email me! Thank you!