Dream House

One day, some years ago, I awoke with the remnants of a peculiar dream still lingering clear and sharp before my mind's eye. I'm a poor sleeper and dreams of any length or coherence are rather rare for me. Usually those I can recall are frustrated narratives; scenarios where some simple task becomes a never-ending process, bogged down by an endless parade of complications and distractions. A rather obvious mirror of my everyday life.

But this one dream was different. There was no narrative, no emotion. Just a crystal clear incredibly detailed experience of a very peculiar place. A house, like nothing else I had ever seen or imagined before which I seemed to be visiting alone, as if it were some secret place waiting to be discovered.

The entrance to this place was along a curving sandy path running through a narrow colorful sandstone slot canyon with a shallow rock-strewn stream running along it. After a sharp bend the canyon widened and the path met a small wooden bridge which crossed the stream and joined a boardwalk following its left-hand bank. The boardwalk broke into occasional steps climbing the gradually steepening bank along the stream. Each such step was marked by a tin lantern with a symbol combining sun, moon, and star cut into it, its gold glow shining in the soft light of the canyon. Further along the boardwalk the canyon widened into a large open space featuring a deep pool accented with a few small clusters of reeds. The boardwalk climbed the left-hand perimeter of the pool where it crossed a broad redwood deck at the back of the canyon opening with a slow quiet waterfall pouring into the pool from a dish-shaped ledge. From there the boardwalk descended along the right-hand side of the pool where it finally ended at an apse-shaped alcove in the sandstone wall. A circular bench here provided a seating space in view of the pool, the walls of the apse decorated by a kind of frieze formed of exposed pyritized fish and shell fossils. Several circular steps descended to meet the crystal clear water of the pool, its sandy bottom accented by an assortment of round stones.

Upon the broad deck was the entrance to the home which was, itself, formed naturally into the complex organic forms of the once again narrowing canyon. Here a large asymmetrical dome form filled another apse-like space. The dome was composed of an array of roughly disc-shaped pieces of glass set in a silvery metal matrix like an enormous stained glass sculpture. Varying in size and hue, the glass was arranged in a fractal-like pattern much like the pattern of random stones in a hand-layed mortarless stone wall. Close up the effect was rather like an insect eye but from a distance created the illusion of a frozen waterfall spilling along the canyon as the glass snaked up the gap forming a kind of skylight roof.

Entering the home through a right-side doorway composed of a curved free-standing wooden arch that penetrated the glass enclosure, I was confronted by an environment at once primitive and futuristic. The deck, here taking the form of thick dove-tail joined boards, filled and leveled the floor of the natural canyon, its boards perfectly crafted to join the sandstone walls and the stream feeding the pool's waterfall hidden below it. Just like the boardwalk outside, the deck climbed the ascending slot canyon floor in steps. A wide staircase snaked along the right-hand wall, sheltering a seating alcove between it and a circular platform. Conformal seating cushions formed a sofa in the seating alcove, shelving snaking along its back and hosting books, decorative objects, and a few soft lamps. Where the seating alcove met the front of the platform above and to the side of it, the shelving expanded into cabinetry, some open, some closed, wrapping the front of the platform and flanking the entrance arch. The natural sandstone walls dominated the look of the broad space, here again decorated in pyratized fossils from a variety of ancient flora and fauna, illuminated from below by soft lighting along the edge of the stairway.

In the matter of the use of the circular platform my perception seemed to be less certain. At one instant the space seemed to assume the function of a kitchen composed of a continuous circular counter or polished stone. In another instant it seemed to take on the roll of an office, the counter now a continuous ribbon of polished wood topped with a few arching lamps with a desk chair formed of a single branching organically sculpted piece of wood supporting seat, back, and arm cushions.

Moving farther along the gently ascending and narrowing canyon, the walls began to branch off into roughly circular chambers. The first was formed to the left of the circular platform and took the form of something like an enormous dinette alcove where the stone walls formed a seating ledge topped by a continuous seating cushion and with a large circular table of polished wood in its center. The top of the space hosted a small domed skylight, formed into the rest of the sculpture-like skylight roof. Next and to the right was a narrow channel which spiraled inward until it met a large bathing pool at the center of the spiral. Fed by an unseen spring, the pool remained perpetually clear and warm and was lit by an open skylight in the chamber ceiling. Next and to the left again was a bedchamber formed much like the dining alcove and with a similar skylight roof but with the space filled by a broad circular mattress, uniform in softness like a large felt or foam mass and covered in cloth in a pattern akin to a Hudson Bay blanket. Smaller alcoves sculpted into the sides of the chamber served as shelving, cabinets, and soft lanterns around this nest-like bed.

At what I perceived to be the 'back' of the house there was an oblong opening in the snaking canyon walls, wider and deeper on the left side than on the right. The right side featured a long seating ledge like a bench covered in continuous cushion. The back of this space was again decorated in that same assortment of pyritized fossils seemingly swimming amidst the colorful layers of the sandstone. On the left a kind of long closet was formed of wooden panels, their edges sculpted to join the organic curves of the rock. A back door was formed much like the front but narrower, consisting of another curved wooden arch where the curious glass skylight roof at last curved downward to end at this doorway.

Emerging from the back of the home I was confronted by a tiny yard space where the canyon walls again began to open up, its floor hard clean sandstone but with a variety of depressions hosting an eclectic garden of succulent plants and cactus. Yet another small seating ledge was naturally formed in the walls of this small garden yard. The stream which I perceived as running hidden below the floors of the house was not to be seen here, the yard being perfectly dry and brightly lit. Apparently this water source was associated with the bathing pool, the waterfall fed by its overflow and hidden stream in some way behaving in the manner of a natural hydronic heating system.

From the back of this space the now much shallower slot canyon split into two branches, one turning sharply and ascending steeply to the left, the other descending subtly to the right. Following the right-hand branch I came upon a large open space with a cluster of small trees and other plants surrounding a small cool water pool. The sandstone walls surrounding the space receded into a kind of ledge under which were sheltered the assorted artifacts of some prior ancient inhabitants. There were colorful shards of broken pottery, fragments of stone and wood tools, and the remnants of painted images on the walls. While in this space I perceived, but did not see, that there were a number of other similar but disconnected spaces farther back in the mass of the sandstone. Some of these were blocked off in some way to function as reservoirs for rainwater which I somehow understood to be the source of potable water for the home.

Returning to take the ascending left-hand path, I found the going rougher due to the steepness, though it seemed as though the natural weathering of the sandstone had ingeniously placed foot and hand holds in precisely the correct places to enable a still relatively easy climb. The canyon walls soon shallowed out and the path emerged at the top of a vast mesa bathed in the soft light of dusk. It was here that my clarity of perception began to fail as I approached wakefullness. My last, now blurry, impressions were of some kind of sophisticated photovoltaic array set along the top of the mesa which I seemed to understand was supplying power to an array of batteries secluded in the closet space in the back end of the home.

My final impression was a sense of having discovered the 'one right place' in the world, whereupon I found myself waking with an unsually strong memory of this dream and the details of this curious home. It is commonly said that one will lose the memory of dreams not immediately written down upon waking. But in this case the memory of this dream has remained quite clear after many years without ever having made, at the time, any particular effort to record it. I have, from time to time, attempted to model this peculiar dream home in 3D graphics but to date its complex organic form has proven more than any humble personal computer could handle. Each attempt quickly brought my computer to its knees from excessive object and polygon counts.

I attribute no particular meaning or great significance to this curious dream other than that it seemed to reflect my desperate need for escape from the hostile and polluted environment of New Jersey to some place of simple serenity. It is like a subconscious construct expressing the theme of personal refuge. I know it is nothing that could be realized in any practical way but it does seem to color the aesthetics of all the designs I have subsequently devised for a home of my own. I find a kind of solace in the fantasy that, perhaps, this place might actually be out there in the world somewhere, hidden, secret, and waiting.