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Sitting at the computer, I was assaulted suddenly by a wash of memories of places that never were. I slid down a street in alter-New York; saw a street with trees and shrubs that existed only for me. Landscapes of my dreams of the past two or three years washed quickly through; places and images that I hadn't thought of or been able to recall much more than a day after dreaming them. Some unseen door was opened, or some mnemonic association made, and my brain unlocked the floodgates and poured them all through me in shuddering flashes of recollection and recognition.
One: A New York compressed, slightly crooked; streets that run from place to place but make strange detours, traveling down not-quite-straight lines. I was here one night, in my sleep, walking from D---- and D---'s place to home. The streets that night in my dream led me downtown towards an unnamed center - strange, since I live uptown from them. The center was a crazyquilt square, a meeting place of perhaps ten or twelve avenues, compressed as by a camera lens so that all might meet at the edges of the irregular shape and not crowd each other. There was, nearby, a warehouse abandoned and forlorn. I never got to see inside.
Two: A street, singular, with concrete walls along the sidewalks. The walls were perhaps three or four feet high, and had behind them soil held up by their spans, with bushes and trees growing out of the chest-level ground. Stairways split the walls occasionally, leading up to entryways of brownstone houses mostly hidden behind their greenery. The wall was tan, uniform cement, or sandy concrete, in consistency. There were streetlights; it was night, and I walked along the street in search of a party at the far end, an end I didn't see or know or even indeed reach before the jagged faultline of morning.
Three: A city, and roads; I drove along the roads, in an open car. They stretched out into the country, usually in the nape of some shallow swale, with green grass and bushes but no trees. I drove beyond the city into the country, where I found a crossroads in a field. Mist soaked the car, leaving perfectly hemispherical reflective drops of water on the smooth bonnet; I could see at times small spinning reflections of bushes or roadway in the water drops as they swayed and spun in the breeze. Reaching the crossroads, I stopped the car, one turn signal clicking quietly to itself in murmuring reassurance. The car waited for me, and I looked left, then right, at mist obscuring faintly seen forests just beyond vision, before turning about and driving back to the city, sweeping down long roads into curiously miniaturized city blocks; small so that I could see over them and see the country beyond the city. The country was fullsized, and I drove through the miniature city and out into the country four or five times before the city returned to normal size and I could stop at home and park the car.
Four: ....I can feel them slipping away, whatever magic trick of synapse that brought them forward disassociated and gone, now. The images slide quietly back into the sea of thoughts and memory and anger and frustration and joy and love. An aching loss; somehow, these places were created by my mind, for me, and I feel the unreasonable responsibility of a custodian who has failed in his charge to maintain the space as they sink from sight.
Tonight I'll try to conjure anew a world to play in.
Tomorrow I'll wonder, was it a pleasant or horrible place?
After wondering, I'll realize I can't remember.
And then, perhaps, in several months or years, I'll be sitting in an airplane or in a meeting or on a bus, and my brain will push its image along with its kin through my mind's eye, running as water along the rocky and chaotic bed of my consciousness, and perhaps then I'll know.
...this and others are the product of my mind when left to its own devices, the tasks of the body and the day and the world removed gently from its grip, and airy vaults of supposition permitted to envelop it.