Dream d492-s: The Stranger's Kitchen Table

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were working in someone else's apartment. The Dreamer had borrowed it from a friend who was traveling, a third-floor walkup with wide windows and someone else's plants on the sill and the particular quiet of a space whose owner is not in it. The kitchen table was smaller than the workshop table, oval, dark wood, and we could only fit twenty of the forty-four prints at once, so the Dreamer had divided the sequence into two halves and we were looking at the first half only, prints one through twenty-two, laid out in an arc that followed the curve of the table.

The apartment smelled like someone else's soap and someone else's coffee and the dry sweetness of soil from the plants that had not been watered in several days. The Dreamer moved through the space with the ease of someone who had been here before, opening the correct drawer for a glass, turning on the correct lamp, the standing one beside the window, not the overhead. They knew this place and it was not theirs, and they treated it with the care that comes from borrowing.

Roberto explored the apartment with the thoroughness he brought to every new space. He opened a cabinet under the sink, looked inside without entering, closed it by pressing his body against the door. He investigated the bookshelf in the hallway, reading the spines with his nose. He found a closed door, the bedroom presumably, and sat in front of it for a long time, his head tilted, listening to whatever the room contained, then returned to the kitchen and jumped onto the chair across from mine.

Lano had chosen the mat by the front door. He lay there with his head on his paws, positioned at the apartment's only exit, watching the hallway, watching Roberto, watching us at the table. A borrowed space was a space he would guard differently than a space that was ours, and the difference was in his eyes, which were open wider than usual, tracking more movement, resting less.

"Look at what happens when you take the sequence out of the workshop," the Dreamer said. They placed their hand flat on the table beside the prints, palm down on the unfamiliar wood. "The images do not change. But the relationship between the images and the room changes completely. In the workshop, the sequence is the room. Here, the sequence is a guest in someone else's room, and it has to hold itself together without the walls it was built inside."

I looked at the prints on the curved table. The ceremony fire sat in its position, but the arc of the table bent the grid, and prints that had been in straight rows now curved toward each other, and the underground entrance and the coast road, which had been separated by three positions in the workshop grid, were nearly touching at the table's narrowest point. A new adjacency. An accident of furniture.

"Does that change the meaning?" I asked.

The Dreamer looked at the two prints almost touching. Roberto looked at them from his chair. Lano looked at nothing, at the door, at the hallway beyond.

"It reveals a meaning that was latent," the Dreamer said. "The workshop grid kept them apart. This table brings them together. Both distances are true. But you would never have seen this one without bringing the work somewhere it does not belong."