I'm in the body of my friend S. (a woman), standing in a lobby of a big old wood hotel (the kind Lily Bart from House of Mirth would stay in). I'm looking across the room at another young woman, who looks just like Liv Tyler and who is radiant. We're dressed in similar school girl outfits: tweed skirts, knee socks, white blouses, cardigans. We both have black hair and bangs. The proprietess, who looks just like a former professor of mine, Rachel Brownstein, watches us from behind the desk. It seems to be about 1930, but it also seems to be some time in the distant future.
I tell the Liv Tyler girl that we need to talk about three things. She motions for me to be quiet, glancing at the proprietess, and then motions for me to follow her. I'd follow her anywhere.
She jumps, swiftly, onto a stack of chairs and then confidently acrosss the top of a high bookshelf piled on top with stacks of books and magazines and disappears through a trap door in the ceiling. I copy her moves, but not swiftly. I find it hard to get from the chairs onto the bookshelves. The proprietess gives me a hand and I make it. But then I'm walking across piles of slippery books and magazines, way up high on a bookshelf. It's not easy. It's like tightrope walking. It's slow. When I finally make it, I see the Liv Tyler girl in a tiny dark attic that leads to an exact copy of the hotel.
The Liv Tyler girl leads me through three or four secret doors, each leading to yet another copy of the hotel. Finally, in the fourth, she leads me up several flights of stairs. Somehow I know we're on the 17th floor, in a hallway, doors all around. She collapses. She's flat on the ground, breathing heavily. I kneel next to her, feeling lucky just to be near her, but worried about her condition. I haven't done it, but I know I should be calling for help. I stare at her radiant skin, her closed eyes, her messy bangs.
An ambulance crew arrives, dressed in white worker's jump suits. Again, they seem from both the 1930s and the future. The proprietess is there, looking on. They're all tending her.
That's all I remember. But, if I were to write a sequel to The Unconsoled, in which Sophie gets to become a full-fledged character, the way Bertha Mason does in Wide Sargasso Sea, this dream would be the kernel of it.
Comments (4)
I've also had dreams in which the setting is a hybrid of past, present, and future. It's kind of like that corny Jude Law movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" set in an alternate reality in the 1930's. The characters are all dressed in 1930's garb, but they live in a futuristic city and have to battle robots. It's sort of like sci-fi pulp. Anyway, I agree that your dream is definitely reminiscent of The Unconsoled. I picture Ryder climbing the flights of stairs and walking through secret passageways only to return again and again to that damn hotel. Maybe if Ryder had run around the city dressed as a schoolgirl our class would be more enthusiastic about the book. (Just don't give Ishiguro any ideas. I don't know if I could take a sequel!)
Posted by Lily Briscoe | December 27, 2006 10:30 PM
Posted on December 27, 2006 22:30
What strikes me after re-reading it is the presence of numbers: "I tell the Liv Tyler girl that we need to talk about three things." This somehow seems to be the germ of the dream. Any speculation on what those 3 things are? Do you think they pertain to the 3or 4 doors that you open? And how do you know you're "somehow ...on the 17th floor?" I'm curious, given that I've been doing so much reading on prophetic dreams and apocalyptic dreams, do you find dreams to be heavily numeric, as most religous dreams are? I don't find that to always be the case, in my case at least. I wonder if that says something about the "divine" aura of numbers, or at least the aura that we project onto them.
Posted by Scott Cheshire | December 28, 2006 9:53 PM
Posted on December 28, 2006 21:53
To Scott: I hadn't thought much about the numbers. I don't think many of my dreams involve numbers, but I'd be interested to hear your prophetic or apocalyptic reading of this one! Do the numbers 3 and 17 have divine auras?
Posted by Lydgate | December 29, 2006 2:25 PM
Posted on December 29, 2006 14:25
I have the answer, the meaning to your dream! Well, not really. But the number three, as I'm sure you already know, is the number of "soul," according to the the mystic--the Chrsitian Trinity; the Buddhist Trinity; the Human Trinity of mind, body and soul; and of course, Gwen Stefani's bindi, her third eye. But even without the psuedo-religous reading, it is the number of narrative completion. Maybe the most holy trinity of all--beginning, middle and end. Not to mention 17! A real coup for number readers: 10 (the number of completion for the Biblical interpreter) and 7 (the number of perfection, if completeness wasn't enough!). Evidently, according to the dream, something is finished. Or perhaps, something must be completed. Rather fitting, given that this was on the cusp of a brand new year.,
Posted by Scott Cheshire | January 2, 2007 4:49 PM
Posted on January 2, 2007 16:49