A little over a year ago I wrote about one of the secret joys of my life, that in dreams there is a consistency to the places I visit. But only lately have I begun to see a place corresponding, in that geography, to the place I now live. I have never had, to be perfectly frank, much love for San Francisco, and perhaps it is only now, as I consider that I may have to leave it, that I am able to see it at all, and this may be why it now appears in my dreams. This city of St. Francis is strangely sweet to me, though I am nearly always lost in it, and always on foot, out in the long western blocks that lead to the ocean. But there are few cars, and many trees, and the park blocks and Golden Gate Park are vast wildernesses. At the western edge the city ends in a grassy cliff above a warm and pacific ocean, blue like French ultramarines dressed in cobalt, and there is a sort of resort there with white wooden buildings connected by long ramps. To the north there are open stoneflagged plazas, with gates leading into quiet gardens with long winding paths around apple trees and fountains.

The other night I found the library, a huge classical edifice built straddling an underground version of Van Ness. It was the sort of library Willy Wonka would have built, with oddly shaped rooms, extremely tall and narrow, round, or even spherical, connected by spiral staircases and secret passages, and organized according to the colors of the books. Needless to say the place was crawling with kids. I met a friend there, and when I told her I was sending out my curriculum vitae she asked to see it to see how I had numbered my pages. She had her dissertation with her, and when I looked at it it seemed to fill itself with equations that she had given whimsical names, and none of which I remember except that there were 2’s lying on their side and that by reading it we were transported to Berkeley, where I woke up.

(cdm | DreamLands )