Airport Dream

Copenhagen Airport. Image from my Flickr stream.

Other people's dreams, like other people's holidays, can be fascinating to hear about, but often they're tedious with a capital Zzz. So I'll keep this brief. Writing a review of the Christopher Nolan film Inception (scheduled for icon 088), I've been thinking about dreams. This has had a curious effect: either I'm dreaming more vividly, or I'm just a little better at remembering them at the moment.

Last night, it was an anxiety dream by the numbers, but it had interesting architectural overtones. I was at an airport - I had a flight to catch. I believed it was Gatwick (my wife flew into Gatwick yesterday), but the terminal building looked more like Rogers' Terminal 5 at Heathrow: a vast shed with a curved roof. I had checked in (somehow) but needed to get into the building to get through security and to my gate. But I couldn't find the door. At street level, the terminal building was an endless inscrutable wall of heavily fritted glass and anodised zinc. I found openings, but they where the exits or service entrances of shops, guarded by security. It was an utterly inhospitable landscape, clearly the wrong place to be, but I had no choice but to continue trekking around the endless perimeter. Eventually I ran into colleagues or peers who I knew would be catching the flight, heading to their gate (suggesting that the trip was work), but I couldn't follow them because there was something I had to do first. Also, they had coffee, and I wondered where they got it from.

That's all. Because it wasn't directed by Chrisopher Nolan, the dream did not deliver a vast surge of catharsis. At no point did I see or hear a plane. Hey, I didn't promise this was going to be worth reading.