There is a place in my mind that I only now realized I have been creating since I was a child. You'll have to bear with me, because as difficult as it is to remember real things that have happened, it's even harder to remember things that haven't happened. Ever since I was little, I've been dreaming of places that do not exist, places which have become woven into an entire collection. Last night, in my dream, I began to live in this world. There were references made to places I had dreamed of before and forgotten, comparisons between these dream places made by my dream mind.
Last night was a particularly strange new place. It began as a nearby park that I had frequented as a child, but as I continued on I passed a place I used to dream about. When I was younger, it had been the carved out side of a mountain, half of which was a beach and half of which was a wave pool. It was now waterless and muddy, with large construction machines idle along the shore. This became the beach that I dreamed of after I broke my arm at the Jersey shore: a cliff of sand that drops down to a violent ocean. I continued through the park and cherry trees became huge tomato plants. Suddenly, my house was in the park. But instead of entering it, I decided to enter a one-storied building that had popped up beside it: it was a maze. This wasn't the first maze I had ever seen in my dreams; I remember a few years ago I dreamt of a line of bungalos on some far-away island that offered endless mazes of rooms once you stepped inside. Like the bungalos, the building twisted and led around to nowhere until finally I entered a small set of offices. I have surely seen these offices before; I remember dreaming about a modeling agency and having run around a huge hall and grandiose staircase connected to tiny offices just like the ones I saw last night. The lighting in the offices was dim, and one door at the end offered an entrance to the foyer of a hotel, where groups of people, some that I knew and some that I've never seen, were congregating. I usually don't see people's faces in dreams, but last night I saw everyone with astonishing detail. I went back into the offices, changed my clothing (for some reason), was asked if I was there for the Vogue casting (I wasn't; to which I was told "You are beautiful"), and went off to find my "boss."
I found my boss, an asian woman of about thirty-five, and she explained what we were doing (putting together a fashion magazine), but never gave me a job to do. I saw an old friend of mine and began to talk to her. We went around together, and at some point I was in my parent's bathroom telling her a story on the phone when she became silent. I asked if everything was okay, and she responded by saying that she didn't want me to tell anyone about the fact that we had been speaking to one another. She explained that I was embarrassing to be associated with.
And then I woke up. What a dream.