I Had the Strangest Deam 

Farine Five Roses, Lachine Canal, Montreal

With a calm canal flickering by one shoulder and a near full moon over the other I couldn't escape the feeling, an intense feeling, of deja vu. I had been here before and I knew every detail. It had been a dream but now I was experiencing it for the first time for a second time. I knew from the moment I stepped from Saint-Ambroise to Turgeon and the eery familiarity of the cascading light over the red brick houses that this was the same surreal, I'm talking Giorgio de Chirico surreal, setting I had wandered through in a dream I had years ago.

I rarely remember the dreams we apparently have every night. Such is my sleep cycle I guess. But occasionally I will awake fresh from a dream in the way that I not only remember it afterwards but that it stays with me for a very long time.


Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower. Giorgio gets it. He knows what I mean. The eery light and misplaced shadows, it's like this guy invented that feeling.

In this dream, it is dusk and I am in a city or a part of a city that seems vaguely industrial but recently gentrified. The streets, though empty are full of considerably lit red brick buildings. I am on my way to a party. I have the invite and am looking for the address and I'm somewhere between feeling lost and resigned to not finding it when I see a young women whom I follow under the logic she must be going to the same party. She turns a corner and enters a building. Convinced this is the place I follow only to realize it isn't. Yet the street number and street name on the building indicate I am very close to my destination. I continue up the street until I hear soft music and voices. I see an open door and as I approach someone calls my name bidding me inside. I enter a warmly lit hallway which opens into a room where somehow everyone knows me. I'm drawn in by welcoming arms and light kisses. For some reason, I'm worried I've left the door open and turn back to close it but now find myself outside, locked out of the embrace of the gathering inside, alone on a darkened street. There is an incredibly bright light at the end of the street and being curious I walk towards it. When I reach the light I realize it is a film set, filming a scene under artificial lights run on generators. Along with others I'm told to stand behind a cordon of yellow tape. At some point I step off a curb and look to ensure my footing but when I look back towards the film set everyone is gone and I find I'm standing alone next to a loud generator running a single cluster of lights. The generator becomes louder until I awake.

That night echoed so much of the dream, describing it now would seem too perfect. In fact it's so perfect I'm sure my brain is doing that thing your brain does, like a malleable keyhole for a putty key, where you find a slot for an idea, dreamt or imagined until it becomes real. It's as if the dream had foretold the moment when in reality it couldn't have been that way. Yet, I knew that street like I had been there (maybe I had been there before?) There was a young woman who I think I bothered with my attention (it would be prudent for anyone to be suspicious of someone watching you as you entered your home - to her I apologize). There was even a construction site with a light run on a generator. But more than any of the actual and weirdly forecast details was the "feeling" down deep in the lizard part of my mind that struck me. There is no way to describe the immensity of it. It filled me. It drenched me. It held me by its fatefulness like the inevitability of a falling glass you know will shatter but are too dumbfounded and helpless to catch.