The City

I don’t remember the first dream I had where I visited The City.

The first series of dreams that I remember containing elements of what I would come to think of as “The City” was of the central train station. In typical dream fashion, the layout was insane: a central, massive concrete cylinder supported a station that looked more like a missile silo than a train station. Walkways from the outside rim to the hub, and stairs going up and down. Trains arrived from everywhere in the City, turned a tight circle around the central cylinder where you hopped on and off, then left again through any number of tunnels around the rim based on the line.

Getting on a train wasn’t for the meek. Some trains didn’t stop completely in the hub - some stopped and stayed for hours. Every train line had a number, and the numbers were important. I’e gotten onto more than one wrong train — given that they also at times have colors, letters and other designations, this is easier than you might think.

All of this comes together to make for a series of frenetic, anxious dreams where I’m trying to catch one train from another, missing a train, missing luggage, missing people who are supposed to be with me. The Hub is a wonder of engineering and organization, and is almost impossible to use correctly.

It’s easiest to explain the layout of the City by using real-world analogies. Drawing map is useless. Every time I’ve tried, I remember another dream that was assuredly in some part of the City or another, but the geography winds up making no sense when you try to picture it all together. There are many islands of stability in the City, but the connections between them are unreliable. Geography is for the foolhardy, but there are places that I’ve visited time and again, in dreams spanning decades.

The most coherent picture of the City is as Manhattan Island. It’s not Manhattan, because I’ve never lived in Manhattan. Most the stable locations in the City are analogs to one part of my life or another: neighborhoods, cities visited, landscapes, hiking trails. The City is my personal Manhattan. Using that image, the Hub is located roughly in Wall Street. Most likely the Hub came from a visit to NYC where I took the PATH train into New York from Newark Airport, and arrived in the station that used ot be in the World Trade Center. When I visited, that was a concrete and rebar hole in the earth with a temporary scaffolded station sitting precariously in the middle of it. The raw shock of realizing where I was has ingrained itself into my mind. I can’t remember that moment without the visceral shock of realizing what it meant.

Above the Hub and extending to the north towards Midtown is the City proper; south of the Hub is a crowded, dense neighborhood that is New York’s Chinatown, Fell’s Point in Baltimore, and other quirky, dense places I’ve visited or lived. I’ve been there many times over - lived in warm, squallid holes; gotten meals; lost people and things. It’s an area thick with memory and sensation. Mostly I just call it The Fells and leave it at that.

From there, the City starts its geographical breakdown. There are bridges leading south from the Fells, or there is a massive harbor akin to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, but much, much larger. On the other side of the bridges (when they’re there) is a smaller reflection of the Fells that melts into a long, steep hill terminating with a university cribbed from my aborted years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Troy, NY. I’ve just tried to locate a couple of the places I used to live there. Found one, and the other is simply an empty lot now. The Stewart’s is still there, though, across the street.

Further afield, things become murkier still. There’s a long train line that runs up Manhattan and skews to the northeast. If you continue from university, there are roads that wind further up into the hills, becoming treacherous mountain roads. There are multiple airports, none of them easily navigated. There are shopping centers and malls dotting the periphery, but their layouts and contents change. Always, though, there are food stands, small artist shops, large department stores, and the One Book Store: a book store that only has copies of one book at a time, thousands of them.

There is a cemetery that stretches for miles, situated on top of the hill that was the backdrop of the farm I grew up on that still haunts my memory. There are country roads that lead to towns controlled by desperate cults. There are farmstands selling nothing, and farmstands whose contents bleed into endless carnivals on midways trodden down to bare dirt.

There is a museum and television studio in Midtown where I have sheltered many times from many apocalypses. The dioramas are endless, the collection vast and the staff non-existent. There are liminal spaces there that defy explanation. There’s always the museum, though, and the theaters above it, and the connections to shopping arcades under the towering majesty of the buildings above.

Switching yards dominate the eastern shore of ‘Manhattan’ where the knot of the Hub’s train lines breaches the surface like the tentacles of a great beast, meeting other trains and scattering to the four winds. The trains are always there, and the Hub is always there, and the City is always there.

You may be asking yourself how I know all of these places are the same place - how can the City really be a thing, a place where I find myself time and again, always under different circumstances, but always with a Sense of Place that is unmistakable. I can’t and don’t explain it. I don’t defend it. The City might just be how my conscious mind deals with a dream life that sometimes feels like a second skin. I’m pretty sure the City is just another place where I have a second consciousness that filters from some vast abyss at right angles to our own. I don’t know.