Had a weird dream a few nights ago. So weird, I had to keep reminding myself about it so I wouldn’t forget it like most dreams.
I was on this trip or tour or excursion with a bunch of people to a massive art project. It was in a huge, multi-story building and the project was by David Byrne of Talking Heads fame. The building was probably 12 stories high, but for whatever reason, we were going to start at level 9. The idea was to work your way down to the bottom while taking in the sights.
The sights, as designed by the artist, were simply rooms presenting a different scene. These scenes represented the gamut of emotional responses, from boring, to humorous, to shocking, to familiar, and on and on. Very much something David Byrne would come up with.
The thing about the exhibit is that it was such a massive building, you couldn’t see all the scenes in one visit and that was how it was designed. You would be on a guided tour and maybe the guide was showing you scenes in a particular order to create the expected emotional responses, not unlike how a song evokes emotions, or in longer form, a concert. Still, very Byrne-esqe.
One of the ridiculous, obviously-a-dream details is that because there was no defined path through the building and you couldn’t tell your way around from room to room, a path was created with mud that had the consistency of chocolate pudding. You would just walk through the muddy path, following the guide.
Well, another tourist and I decided that we didn’t want to miss out on any of the rooms in the exhibit, so we were going to break from the pack and see as much as we could. It was understood that this behavior wasn’t discouraged, so we did it. After seeing a couple of other rooms, we wondered how we were going to keep track of which rooms we’d seen already. I had the idea of smearing some of the guide path mud on the door so we could identify which we’d seen already. It was a good idea and we continued, eventually lagging behind and losing our group.
Now alone, I started to get a little concerned about being in this huge building where the rooms connected without any sense and some looked very similar to others so you couldn’t exactly make your way through it with memory. Then I noticed that the group’s muddy trail was drying up and disappearing…
As that fear was building in me, I turned to my companion and asked if the desk we were at was the same one we had seen just a little bit ago. I looked closely at it but couldn’t tell if I had smeared some mud on it or not. And it this point, I kind of knew we were lost.
I woke up shortly after that. As I kept reminding myself of some of the details, I started coming up with more things that could have happened, but I think those were probably influenced memories.
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