The world of dreams

I do not have concious memories of my early childhood but my dreams are set in a world clearly seen through the eyes of a toddler.

Over the decades I identified the real world places those dreams take place. This is a dream world built from the city and wider area I live in to this day.

The river

The city is sprawling up and down the mountainsides surrounding the widest river man has ever seen. The river is at the center of the city valley. Cutting it into two. Flowing through a deep gash.

Outside the city it is wide and dark, its shores holding secret places overgrown by wilderness.

But where it gets narrower and tamed by walls, it turns into a violent white gush.

Behind the wall, in the gush, there's a monster. One that eats ships and smashes rocks.

Upstream, the high end of the city, the stone walls contain it until it drops down a monsterous waterfall. It rides above the street level, weird off by thick high stone walls. When you walk next to those walls, you hear the gushing above.

Climbing atop the wall, a rare sight, the valley drops down a good hundred meters, a waterfall so loud it is frightening.

Ships and boats ride the deadly stream below the fall. Giants of black steel.

I remember riding the waters in a small boat, flung around by the waves. The ships towering over me like buildings as they pass. The waterline is a death zone.

Black giants of steel. So close I can touch them. Their engines roaring, the water beneath them a deadly stream. The water is brown and reeks of oil.

Further downstream, still within the city limits, the river widens. One side being straightened and holding a high promenade, the other a wide green plane. The bridges have to span this plane as it is part of the river. A foot bridge, several stories tall and ending in large towers filled with staircases, is build from large blocks of sandstone. It is always filled with people, as it the promenade.

The trains

Tram tracks are sneaking up steep mountain sides. So many lines and every changeover has the potential to get you lost. Ending up in the wrong part of town, unable to reach a destination.

Furthermore, no train goes directly into the city. There's the mandatory changeover just outside of town. A station in a tiny village, yet it has countless platforms that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Every changeover is a hurry to catch the last train. Sometimes even jumping on a moving one. The distance trains are hard to describe. They are dimly lit and grimy, with little to no comfort, like the old intercity trains I would take on long nightly rides, sitting in the doorways in lack of a seat.

Long nights do I ride. Unable to sleep on the hard floor, my head resting against cold steel painted red. The windows are black, no light in sight.

On the run

In almost all of my dreams I am on the way somewhere, searching for some place, being lost somehow. Be it in the large building on the campus with its many staircases that all look alike, cycling the land at night, in sight of the river or a highway leading the way. In the streets or the subways in a huge metropolitan city resembling places I've visited.

But getting where I plan to go, finding who I look for, never comes to pass.

Always on the run - running through the night.

City lights - They used to guide me like the stars guide a sailor. The chatter in shady street corners speaking parlor, the whisper of the street.