Age and Antiquity

4/4/2016: 7 Hours Later... 
IMAGE: Eugene V. Thaw Collection

It has been a long time since I have written about any of my dreams. This one was primarily memorable for its visual style and architectural design, and I can only hope I remember enough to do it justice.

The dream started out visiting the house of a wealthy friend of a friend who I did not appreciate the company of. I suppose he was something of a personality half way between a young Donald Trump and the character 'Biff' from back to the future. Some relatively unremarkable and unexciting things happened and before long me and a few friends had decided to leave this place and go exploring.

At this point, I was wandering a wonderful night time city that within the dream narrative was my home town of Melbourne but looking back, was nothing like it. I was both alien and utterly fantastic; and as my dream lucidity came on-line to tell me that what I was witnessing was far too strange to be anything like the real Melbourne, a justification came to me that this was simply because I was exploring Melbourne from the distant past. Oh, well in that case!! I said to myself and curiously, thought it necessary to question no further.

We found ourselves in an arcade of some description, having a conversation with an older man. He was possibly in his 70's and was telling us about his life in the Army and fun times he had had in his youth, and started describing a men's club he had frequented which got me thinking. He then started listing explosives he was familiar with and said something like "Mercury falidate" which I then corrected to "Mercury Fulminate". I have no idea how I know this but it seems the latter is actually a real explosive. The older man just stood there looking at me... and I was momentarily unsure whether he was angry, in denial, deep in thought or full of shame... or simply switched off to allow the cognitive dissonance to pass. A friend whispered to me "I think you have made grandpa there blue screen" and as I looked into his eyes I could almost see the computational processes battling to restore their operating consistency in the face of the sudden shock I had evidently distributed among their operating environment.

We left the old man just standing there... and on the way out of the arcade, passed an Army recruitment center, and a uniform/replica firearm/paraphernalia shop with weapons on proud display in the shop front window. I felt a sudden urge to run inside, or at least the echo of what I anticipated to be that very urge but instead which never came: I simply passed the row of martial totems in a strange kind of vacuum. I have previously explored the unusual affinity I have experienced in-dream for secret or mysterious marketplaces selling the tools of combat in my entry 'The Birth of the Esoteric' and reasoned then that it probably emerges from the re-discovery of deeply unconscious evolutionary processes relating to tool creation for hunting and warfare. Why this did not activate in the dream; and so conspicuously failed to activate that even within the dream I was slightly surprised, is another concept to explore entirely, but for whatever reason all I felt was that these objects were now strangely uncool and musty.

We found ourselves discovering the very men's club the old Army officer had mentioned, and were transported even further back in time to what I can only assume was the 1920's. The design inside this place was astounding. Everything was made out of sage coloured leather, polished mahogany, brass or red velvet. There was a long corridor with a series of bedrooms leading off it; which I assumed implied the men's club was actually just a brothel. Gazing into a few as I passed, I could see women in varioius states of undress, wearing the utterly ancient underwear of the times. Momentarily pausing to contemplate, I wondered whether this did not in some fashion make them more attractive as it forced one to perceive the person beneath the facade, and whether this might not have been the entire purpose of this hideous underwear all along.

But there was also a spacious living room on the opposite side of the coridoor, spanning its entire length, that was full of comfortable looking floor cushions, a fire place or two, and expensive looking ashtrays, which lead me to conclude the place was not a simple brothel but a social club in an era where sex work among the elite was fairly normalised and even a slightly high-brow activity. A person proclaimed to me "This place was Ronald Regan's favourite, back in the day. Every time he would come to Australia he would visit here" which looking back was absurd for so many reasons. We soon transversed the corridor and found ourselves in the main area; which was a beautiful cigar lounge with comfortable spacious couches, a bar, a vintage telephone box and of course what I presumed to be something between waitresses and hostesses and escorts, walking around distributing their attention.

I gazed at the room around me, and pondered for a second "maybe life in the old days was not so bad: provided you were lucky". It is an argument I have with myself on almost a daily basis. Has technology, modernity and civilisation fundamentally destroyed something once so quaint and special to the human condition? Why have we made all of this useless stuff when life could have been just as rewarding without it. I often wonder whether society as a whole indulges in technological advancement for its own sake much the way a frustrated and unhappy member of the working upper class spends all their income on things they don't necessarily want, for abject lack of anything better to do and to partially dull the pain of their high stress occupations. I unusually find ways to reason that technology is good for its own sake, but sitting in this room, in this dream, I would have traded anything in the world to have gone back in time and simply been a part of the social exclusivity and aesthetic that this scene represented.

Shortly after, somebody entered the men's club by force and shot everybody. I lay there, watching the bullets break bones and body and knew some how that all the bullets would miss me. As this gruesome scene came to and end I suddenly appreciated the counterpoint and indeed, punchline of my own argument: life was not so great in the old times because of things like this. The man was a gangster of some description and had been involved in a dispute with his girlfriend, who was a sex worker at the club. I am not sure this was ever explained to me in the dream, but I know it as I write it now so at some implicit or explicit level it was a fact of the dream that made its way into awareness on at least available domain.

We left the club, some of us limping from gunshot wounds and others being dragged out on stretchers. I resented going back to modernity, and leaving behind this pristine and beautiful scene but simultaneously aware that such places existed in a state of fragility and could only be appreciated as beautiful precisely because they were so transient and so fundamentally at risk of destruction within their own epoch. I suppose then, what I ultimately resented was the return to reality where I had both safety and the kind of dullness and dearth of appreciation that that very safety cultivates. Part of me very much wanted to stay in that men's club forever, hermetically sealed off from the outside world, on the one hand totally indulging in my denial that this could all come crashing down at a seconds notice; whilst on the other hand paradoxically so able to appreciate this joy only because I had also at some level embraced this point too.

Waking up I suddenly had the urge to re-decorate my apartment in a quasi-steampunk/Victorian theme but the idea did not last longer than my attention span, and soon I was watching political analysis on the news and continuing with building my new drone. I have no idea why the female sex workers featured in my dream the way that they did; for internally I held no arousal whatsoever, even when looking back. Perhaps they too represented the happiness of a bygone era, and the innocence by which one could enjoy in the spoils of gender-derived power politics without having to pay for it in raw guilt or social shame. I think it is remarkably telling that in a fantasy dream about indulging in denial and returning to a so-called glorious past, my primary nostalgia for the era and indeed for the bordello itself were its fixtures and fittings, and not the manner in which I was suddenly permitted to treat other human beings. And that thought makes me feel very comforted, and dare I say it: proud to be a citizen of modern times.