The chimney house

More vertical geography:

I've just moved into a new apartment. I live on the upper floor of a converted house, and my friend SD lives on the ground floor. A chimney runs up one side of the house, and we each have a window which opens into the chimney.


The inside of the chimney is airy and well-lit, and lined with bright books. If SD ever happens to be by the window downstairs, or is looking for books in the chimney, I can attract his attention by waving a shiny pencil, and he will climb up the bookshelves to come and say hello.

Later on, while we're inside another building, there's a frightening episode when deep fissures open up in the ground, and angry vampires hurl human bodies back and forth. But the verticality is less pronounced during this episode, in that I'm not able to see very far into the fissures, and certainly not about to try climbing down them.

Disorientation

We have been talking about how one's actual geographical orientation in dreams functions. Especially the non-euclidian aspects of dream geography, and the multiple overlayering of place. But these are usually based on secondary analytic responses. What is the psychic operation we actually perform within the dream to know where we are? I posted a piece on "associative geography" at the sister icecrawler site two months ago, but I could have posted it here as well.

However, in dreams, the determination of place can be considered part of constructing the very place in the dream, and so the geographical knowledge may come much more directly and be a part of the place itself. When it isn't, one keeps jerking with imagining overlaying of the various places which have provided buldingblocks, or mere mnemonic associations.

But there are single dreams where we actually ask ourselves "where am I" and invent on the spot a method of investigating this. This is one of the basic questions of the cormorant council. Please give us your examples.

MF

PS mainly for those who read Swedish, I just posted a long dream including geographical themes (and some dream art), and a heroic appearance by the people behind the cormorant council as an explorer's expidition at the hälleflundran blog. For some reason I had written it down in Swedish.