Mansions

I dreamed the wife and I had moved into an apartment on the waterfront, overlooking The City. It was a vast Beaux Arts building, and reminded me of an inflated version of the Hoboken train station or Asbury Park Convention Hall. It seemed almost like an old mill building that had been converted into apartments. The corridors were filled with intricate brass ornamentation and tiles, with various staircases crisscrossing. The interior was a giant open atrium going up five or six stories.

We wandered the halls like amused kids, staring at everything: the décor, the people. There was a feeling of overwhelming peace, as if we had arrived. The kids had moved off and were living on their own, but were coming to visit us. The place was swarming with folks, teeming with life.

My wife thought we were in the right hallway, somewhere on the fourth floor, and entered an open door that we thought was our place. She smiled, somewhat embarrassed, when the true residents appeared and walked past her: a kid, a kind of Peruvian cast to him, with long hair split down the middle, and two men with beards and glasses, whom I took to be the parental figures. We apologized stumblingly and headed off.

This was not much of a dream except for the extraordinary "feel" of it, the place itself. We could never afford a place like that in a million years, of course. The vibe of it was good, though, and there was a potent tactile element (feeling the coarse fabric of my wife's clothing, for instance) that was unusual.