Architectural Dreams

What kind of place do your dreams take place in?

More often than not, mine involve staircases. Sometimes they're concrete and steel, like in a parking garage. Sometimes they're carpet and polished wood, like at a fancy lodge.

Oftentimes, the stairs lead to very tight spaces that I have to squeeze through to continue my journey. Other times (especially in the industrial concrete stair towers), they lead up to handrail-less portions where I have to jump to the next landing over a bottomless chasm.

In the warm, comfortable lodge setting, the stairs often penetrate straight through bedrooms, criss-crossing here and there, as if each level of the hotel/dorm/lodge is a series of skinny bedrooms connected end-to-end by open doorways horizontally and open stairwells vertically. Curiously, the stairs are rarely spiral.

These dreams always have other people in them. In the dorm/lodge version, everybody else goes about their daily business while I race up, down, across, up, and down again. Am I searching for something? Am I running away from something? I don't know.

In the parking garage/industrial version, most of the other people in the dream are climbing the stairs with me. And we only go up. It has a definite feel as if we're escaping something. Once, I remember that we emerged onto a rooftop into the daylight. People were on the green lawn below, going about their business. Buildings across the street, just a normal day. ... Or was there a gunfight going on? It's hard to remember.

Long ago, these strange stair dreams often took place at my great-aunt Ethel's house, but not anytime recently. I recall secret staircases in the basement, just barely large enough to climb through, that would emerge on the second floor. Go down one and back up another.

I mention all of this because I read a post at Bldg Blog about such things. More specifically, about dreams of hidden rooms within apartments/houses:

A friend of mine once told me about the "typical dream of a New Yorker," as he described it, wherein a homeowner pushes aside some coats and sweaters in the upstairs closet... only to reveal a door, and, behind that, another room, and, beyond that, perhaps even a whole new wing secretly attached to the back of the house...

Always fantasizing about having more space in Manhattan.

And so I was thinking today that you could go around Manhattan with a microphone, asking people who have had that dream to describe it, recording all this, live, for the radio – or you ask people who have never had that dream simply to ad lib about what it might be like to discover another room, and you ask them to think about what kind of room they would most like to discover, tucked away inside a closet somewhere in their apartment.

What additions to space do the people of New York secretly long for?

I know I definitely wished for more space when I lived in Manhattan! A bedroom of my own, perhaps, or a real kitchen. How about a solarium?