I had the most incredible dream (keep reading, it will turn out to not be a dream at the end). I lived in a hilly place with beautiful money. The houses were all castles with deep colors like clay. Blue clay, green, etc. It was ringed with mountains but also with giant ships. It was placid but also lush with sudden commerce around some corners. Spacious and dense. A kind of sports complex appeared abruptly, maybe two minutes’ walk from my house. In it were batting cages, pool tables, tennis courts, etc. Directly across from it were bowling alleys.
The architecture recursed and bubbled like a coral reef, like clay crystals. Birds appeared from invisible envelopes. Dogs barked from behind gates. Other dogs walked serenely in the streets, as if they remembered my last dream. Iron bars were thinking. It was all beautiful in the way that something can only be if it wasn’t as beautiful before, kind of like dating. The morning breathed because, well, of course it did. It’s what they do. I went back inside, then I went back outside, then I went inside, then back outside. Like I could start it over at will. As you can see, lots of obvious clues that it was just a dream. It had those sorts of lucid elements. That faint ebbing sense that you will wake from it, that lets you hold it all the way around.
I went back out to see it again, but of course things had already changed, not for better or worse necessarily. It had that in-your-face neutrality.
A bird sat on the spire of a fir tree and honked. In the middle distance the mute profile of a billboard. Palm trunks grew at diagonals with just a tiny amount of leaves at the tops. A cursive sign announced vacancies. Some people sat in their cars doing nothing, some alone and some in twos. Oh, I was a Mexican! I almost forgot. A chihuahua sat on an overstuffed chair beneath a concrete awning. Flowers poured from walls. Houses where I had just stood looked down from cliffs. But it was all just reality.