a looking-glass book

memories

(i dont normally post personal stuff on here, thats a job for my 'real' home. but i had a dream last night that has snowballed into a lot of the things ive been currently trying to understand.)

(if youre like most people and dont care about other peoples dreams, hit 'extended entry' and read the rest of the thoughts in parens. the stuff outside the parens is the dream. the rest is my reaction.)

(last night.)
i dreamed that i was giving carter a tour of bennington. my heart swooned with pride of the school. it was more mountainous than in reality, with the campus being much bigger and more crowded.

we drove into town and walked around. as we stood in about the middle of campus, i drug her up a big hill to vapa [15 on the map] (in my dream i recalled it as the barn but then as vapa, then the vapa building, then visual and performings arts building). we walked around, exploring nooks and crannies and i tried to explain my time in the lofts there to her. it was a lost cause, but i remember remembering the tunnel to under the stage that none of us wanted to enter.

we walked into a demonstration, with many people get a lecture. i think nohaptimus was there though im not sure in what capacity.

as we left, it became obvious through listening that the lecture was radio related. i had forgotten they have a station there.

we walked back out and down and i pointed out the main building [3], hidden like a ski lodge up and to the right of the hill, hidden by trees. carter didnt want to see it, so we walked down the hill to the 'dorms' [1].

i pointed out the houses, which were more traditional victorian than the true houses. i pointed out skyes and said thats where hank lived. highways encroached all around. we walked to the 'end of the world' [20], which had been taped and re-leveled, so it was merely a small downhill spot now. the dorms where matt lived freshman year were not only gone, but highways made it impossible to even tell where they had been.

we loaded up and left.

(weirdness. i remember thinking yesterday briefly about bennington as i went to class. i didnt realize the exact power the barn and that school had on me. the importance of having a lab space, a creative space. need to mention this whole thing to mark today. we need this space here.)

(it is also exceedingly odd to remember such a space that is so far away. i am sitting in a coffee shop on hollywood blvd, thinking about the campus of a small, extremely liberal college in new england that i think i attended in a former life. that i spent a total of maybe 2 weeks living at and yet hold more intense memories from it sometimes than any of the other colleges i have attended over the last ten years.)

(i dont understand the combination of memory and location. not remembering a specific time but understanding another part of the world so throughly it become a feeling. you can imagine yourself walking through that space, remembering your actions there. its what happens when you think of a place, not a time. and it is happening to me with bennington right now. and apparantly it has been happening since some time last night.)

(im on this huge nostalgia kick right now, along with time, location and memory. part of this i think is psychological aftereffects of being sick, part is my thesis, part is trying to remember where i have come from and where im going. more on this later, im sure.)

***

(about 10 minutes after posting this, 20 after writing it, i went and found all the links to the bennington map. i would like to point out that i originally called the 'end of the world' the 'edge of the world'. but that it was all typed up straight from memory, though with all the links, its easy to think i assembled it with help from the map. i feel like that would be cheating somehow and i feel like the story is less pure now. but i wanted badly to give context. and what exactly does that bring to memory?)