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When I was a kid, the department store in the county town had a mirrored staircase. The store held two floors, the ground floor and the basement, and there were two broad flights of stairs between them. The three walls of that stairwell were walled in mirrors, so that as you walked down them, you could see yourself arcing out to infinity on either side, endlessly traversing up and down the steps, caught in transition between up and down, echoed to infinity on all sides.
It was fascinating. I used to spend as much time as humanly possible on the staircase, when we were in that store. (Admittedly, part of that was that I hated clothes shopping, and shoe shopping, and had to be dragged around the place at the best of times). Mam never had to use the intercom when we wandered off there. She just had to swing by the stairs on the way out. Reliable as clockwork, that's where I'd be.
Sometimes, when I look at the dreams I have ... I think that staircase must have flipped some sort of switch in my brain, or something. Because I have a fondness for ... I suppose you could call them 'transitional spaces'? *smiles faintly* I don't know. Stairs. Tunnels. Bridges. Hotel lobbies. Piers. Trains. The between places. The places between one stop and the next. They are ... I don't know. They do something.
I had a dream, once, where I stepped off a stairs not unlike that one, and out into ...
It was fascinating. I used to spend as much time as humanly possible on the staircase, when we were in that store. (Admittedly, part of that was that I hated clothes shopping, and shoe shopping, and had to be dragged around the place at the best of times). Mam never had to use the intercom when we wandered off there. She just had to swing by the stairs on the way out. Reliable as clockwork, that's where I'd be.
Sometimes, when I look at the dreams I have ... I think that staircase must have flipped some sort of switch in my brain, or something. Because I have a fondness for ... I suppose you could call them 'transitional spaces'? *smiles faintly* I don't know. Stairs. Tunnels. Bridges. Hotel lobbies. Piers. Trains. The between places. The places between one stop and the next. They are ... I don't know. They do something.
I had a dream, once, where I stepped off a stairs not unlike that one, and out into ...
It wasn't a cavern. Cavern isn't the word for a thing that huge. There were no walls, only a grey-dark haze where the world lost definition in the distance, everywhere you looked. Underground, though you couldn't really see the ceiling, just a darkness somewhere over the hanging of the lights. The warm, yellow electric lights you get in train stations at night, strung from that invisible ceiling.
Which was fitting enough, because a train station was what it was. Or, rather, a station platform, extending into the distance forwards and backwards from where the stairs landed, endless in both directions. The tracks lay on either side of it, and other platforms on the other sides of them, on and on, as infinite to either side as that mirrored staircase had made the ten-year-old me. The platform, like the stairs, infinite before you. And the mirrored images, infinite on either side.
Not featureless, though. In between the trains, ghosting along the tracks between them, endlessly moving in one direction (one train going forward on the left side of the platform, one going the other way on the right), the platform rose and fell in gentle undulations down into the distance. Levels, two to three steps above or below each other, rising and falling unevenly along the length and width of the platform. Not regular, regimented blocks, up and then down, but curved sections, oddly shaped, with paths between them.
Each level, for the space it held sway, held a hotel lobby. *smiles* Faded carpets, in reds and greens and browns and navies, running right up to the edges of the platform, drooping unevenly over the side towards the track beds. Railings between the levels, wooden or carpetted steps up between them, little staggered islands in the edges of the rise and fall. Ancient furniture, leather sofas and armchairs, ugly little knee-high tables, odd little lockers and sculptures scattered around. No paintings, since there were no walls to hang them on. Nothing above shoulder height. Each little lobby a circle of light and chintz and tired comfort, circled by the rise and fall of its level, gently giving way to each other over and over as the platform faded into the grey distance.
*props chin in hand* A world of transition, bascially. You could step onto one of the trains. It didn't really matter which one, or which direction it was going in. You could ride them, in the warm, swaying carriages, with cheap coffee and cheaper food, from stop to stop. You could step out whenever you pleased, and that stop would be your lobby. For a while. Stretch out on an exhausted sofa, wriggle yourself into something approaching comfort, and sleep a little while before moving on. Take the train again, maybe, or if you wanted walk along the platform instead, climb the steps between lobbies, following the thread of the rise and fall between them, for as far as you wanted to go.
You could climb out the other side of the trains, either. Find yourself on the next platform along. Move yourself sideways through infinity in a bizarre zigzag, travelling however many stops one way on one train, get out at that platform lobby, then take the train on the other side, going the other way, for however many stops as you felt like before climbing out at the next platform over again. Creeping your way laboriously sideways, finding yourself drifting further and further out of alignment until there was simply no way to know where you had first come into this place, how far backwards or forwards it had been, how many platforms sideways.
Endless transition, in all directions. An endless warm, electric night, an underground infinity of weary comforts and shiftless motion, moving without aim or knowledge save whatever brief experiments you wanted to indulge in.
Some of the lobbies were like islands, places that had gathered people more permanently to them, little communities that had formed between certain stops of the trains. They'd take the trains on short runs, between familiar stops and back, for the food and the coffee and the toilets, and come back to their 'home' lobbies for sleep, for community, for some sense of strange permanence in a shiftless world.
Others would live on the trains themselves. Communities that only ever touched the platform communities briefly, because the trains only ran in one direction, and they never, ever stopped for more than minutes at a time. Those people, those carriages full of singular purpose, were set on finding out what lay at the end, because there had to be an end somewhere. Utterly shiftless, never touching or seeing the places they'd left behind again. The only permanence in the train itself, and the people who hadn't left it.
And somewhere, in all of that, on some platform, at some distant stop, there would be another stair. Rising from some one of the lobbies, partially invisible, that would take you out of that planar infinity to something else, above or below, a vertical end/change where there was never a horizontal one. All you had to do was find it. To move forwards, backwards, sideways, far enough to come across it, them. Leave those huddled places of permanence long enough, far enough, to find the way out, and move to something different.
I remember standing there, in the dream. At the bottom of the staircase itself. My mind moving over the cavern, the way you can do in dreams, the way you can know and experience things in dreams in ways you couldn't if the world were real. I remember standing there, and being ... not afraid. There was nothing terrible in what I felt out there, nothing fearsome about that world. Not to me. But ... nervous. Wondering if I dared step off the stairs, dared lose them, and move into that world without permanence, wondered if I dared lose my way, when I could not guarantee I would find it again. Where I might wander aimlessly for an infinity, and fail to find another stair. I stood there, with my feet glued to the bottom step, and wondered if I dared move out into that endless, electric night.
*smiles wonkily* Of course, that moment of wondering, poised with my stomach in knots and the strange longing to step forward, was the moment when I woke up.
I do dream of that place still. Snatches, pieces. Sometimes on the stairs. Sometimes following the rise and fall along the platforms. Sometimes riding the trains, staring out the windows into the grey-dark-yellow distance, looking for something higher than shoulder height, for a phantom shape of a stairwell rising up out of the gloom. Sometimes just sitting in the lobbies, curled in some squashed, battered armchair, listening to the trains pass endlessly.
I love it. It's ... comforting, maybe. A strange comfort in how similar the ways in which we are lost, a strange hope in how we move or build or hold still despite it. A soft, yellow transition, a warm, electric night. Forever.
Or at least, until we find the stairs, and the next transition on. *smiles softly* Until then, at least. Heh.
Forgive me my dreams, yes. And carry on, to the next platform, or the next stop on.
Which was fitting enough, because a train station was what it was. Or, rather, a station platform, extending into the distance forwards and backwards from where the stairs landed, endless in both directions. The tracks lay on either side of it, and other platforms on the other sides of them, on and on, as infinite to either side as that mirrored staircase had made the ten-year-old me. The platform, like the stairs, infinite before you. And the mirrored images, infinite on either side.
Not featureless, though. In between the trains, ghosting along the tracks between them, endlessly moving in one direction (one train going forward on the left side of the platform, one going the other way on the right), the platform rose and fell in gentle undulations down into the distance. Levels, two to three steps above or below each other, rising and falling unevenly along the length and width of the platform. Not regular, regimented blocks, up and then down, but curved sections, oddly shaped, with paths between them.
Each level, for the space it held sway, held a hotel lobby. *smiles* Faded carpets, in reds and greens and browns and navies, running right up to the edges of the platform, drooping unevenly over the side towards the track beds. Railings between the levels, wooden or carpetted steps up between them, little staggered islands in the edges of the rise and fall. Ancient furniture, leather sofas and armchairs, ugly little knee-high tables, odd little lockers and sculptures scattered around. No paintings, since there were no walls to hang them on. Nothing above shoulder height. Each little lobby a circle of light and chintz and tired comfort, circled by the rise and fall of its level, gently giving way to each other over and over as the platform faded into the grey distance.
*props chin in hand* A world of transition, bascially. You could step onto one of the trains. It didn't really matter which one, or which direction it was going in. You could ride them, in the warm, swaying carriages, with cheap coffee and cheaper food, from stop to stop. You could step out whenever you pleased, and that stop would be your lobby. For a while. Stretch out on an exhausted sofa, wriggle yourself into something approaching comfort, and sleep a little while before moving on. Take the train again, maybe, or if you wanted walk along the platform instead, climb the steps between lobbies, following the thread of the rise and fall between them, for as far as you wanted to go.
You could climb out the other side of the trains, either. Find yourself on the next platform along. Move yourself sideways through infinity in a bizarre zigzag, travelling however many stops one way on one train, get out at that platform lobby, then take the train on the other side, going the other way, for however many stops as you felt like before climbing out at the next platform over again. Creeping your way laboriously sideways, finding yourself drifting further and further out of alignment until there was simply no way to know where you had first come into this place, how far backwards or forwards it had been, how many platforms sideways.
Endless transition, in all directions. An endless warm, electric night, an underground infinity of weary comforts and shiftless motion, moving without aim or knowledge save whatever brief experiments you wanted to indulge in.
Some of the lobbies were like islands, places that had gathered people more permanently to them, little communities that had formed between certain stops of the trains. They'd take the trains on short runs, between familiar stops and back, for the food and the coffee and the toilets, and come back to their 'home' lobbies for sleep, for community, for some sense of strange permanence in a shiftless world.
Others would live on the trains themselves. Communities that only ever touched the platform communities briefly, because the trains only ran in one direction, and they never, ever stopped for more than minutes at a time. Those people, those carriages full of singular purpose, were set on finding out what lay at the end, because there had to be an end somewhere. Utterly shiftless, never touching or seeing the places they'd left behind again. The only permanence in the train itself, and the people who hadn't left it.
And somewhere, in all of that, on some platform, at some distant stop, there would be another stair. Rising from some one of the lobbies, partially invisible, that would take you out of that planar infinity to something else, above or below, a vertical end/change where there was never a horizontal one. All you had to do was find it. To move forwards, backwards, sideways, far enough to come across it, them. Leave those huddled places of permanence long enough, far enough, to find the way out, and move to something different.
I remember standing there, in the dream. At the bottom of the staircase itself. My mind moving over the cavern, the way you can do in dreams, the way you can know and experience things in dreams in ways you couldn't if the world were real. I remember standing there, and being ... not afraid. There was nothing terrible in what I felt out there, nothing fearsome about that world. Not to me. But ... nervous. Wondering if I dared step off the stairs, dared lose them, and move into that world without permanence, wondered if I dared lose my way, when I could not guarantee I would find it again. Where I might wander aimlessly for an infinity, and fail to find another stair. I stood there, with my feet glued to the bottom step, and wondered if I dared move out into that endless, electric night.
*smiles wonkily* Of course, that moment of wondering, poised with my stomach in knots and the strange longing to step forward, was the moment when I woke up.
I do dream of that place still. Snatches, pieces. Sometimes on the stairs. Sometimes following the rise and fall along the platforms. Sometimes riding the trains, staring out the windows into the grey-dark-yellow distance, looking for something higher than shoulder height, for a phantom shape of a stairwell rising up out of the gloom. Sometimes just sitting in the lobbies, curled in some squashed, battered armchair, listening to the trains pass endlessly.
I love it. It's ... comforting, maybe. A strange comfort in how similar the ways in which we are lost, a strange hope in how we move or build or hold still despite it. A soft, yellow transition, a warm, electric night. Forever.
Or at least, until we find the stairs, and the next transition on. *smiles softly* Until then, at least. Heh.
Forgive me my dreams, yes. And carry on, to the next platform, or the next stop on.