In search of the dream klimat

What could be more boring than someone else's dreams? I shall try not to bore; in this post I intend to examine how I 'see' places in dreams.

Last night I dreamt I was in North West London, with the children (Moni is seven and Eddie is four. They are always this age in my dreams. And for years I've always been in my mid-30s. This is, in itself, interesting).

But it's the location that's significant; it's this aspect of dreams I want to explore in this post. While there were no distinctive landmarks featured in my dream, the look and feel of the environment was quite clearly North West London. Anywhere between Cricklewood and Edgware. This was neither West London, nor was it North London. London's suburbs have distinct characters. A native Londoner doesn't need to map to know which part of the capital he's in. A landscape of brick railway arches where the Underground runs above street level, rows of ethnic shops, plane trees, bus stops.

In this respect my dreams are like my flashbacks. The 'look and feel', the atmosphere, the sense of the place, the klimat, the zeitgeist and platzgeist - is all there, though the details may not match. Unlike flashbacks, which are static references to a time and place, dreams are dynamic and include narratives that will often yield curious plots or occurrences. In this one, we're in a small DIY shop. We notice some other customers talking Polish to one another. Then two people at the counter asked whether three rolls of wallpaper could be wrapped up and posted to Poland. The shop assistant answered in Polish. It then occurred to me that all eight people in this shop were in fact all from Poland. But really, this particular detail is neither here nor there, as this was but one fragment of a longer, rambling dream, all set in the same location. What matters is the spirit of place, the spirit of North West London.

Sometimes my dreams feel (while I'm dreaming them) to have an uncanny geographic precision; last week I dreamt of a newsagent's, on the Boston Road, Hanwell London W7. In my dream, it was situated on the corner, at the end of the row of shops just across the road and to the north of Boston Manor Underground station. In reality (courtesy of Google Maps Street View*) I can see that a) there's no street corner here - there's a row of flats, and b), it's not a newsagent's but a dry cleaner's. So my 'remote viewing' is close, but not accurate.

Often (and I wonder how many expats** also experience this), I have dreams set in both Poland and the UK at the same time; an anglicised Warsaw with London buses for example. The spirit of place gets fused.

My point being? My consciousness feels a strong affinity with place. Whether in such dreams, or in flashbacks to my childhood, or in those anomalous flashbacks I have described, the klimat of place is the feature that I'm most aware of. I wonder to what extent this is universal; whether others dream of places as I do - and what this signifies?

* Google's Street View is amazing. At the drop of a hat I can zoom into a place and pick up that klimat in seconds. Remote viewing made real.

** An article in this week's Economist suggests that expats are more creative than stay-at-home types.

This time last year:
Zakopane to Kraków at 25mph
Blackpool-in-the-Tatras

This time two years ago:
"The year's most beautiful day" (Thomas Bewick)