I listen to WNYC.org every day. It’s a relic of my experience there, though I live very far from the city. I heard that there are a number of families protesting the production of the new Oliver Stone exploit World Trade Center.
I had a dream about a week ago. It was very vivid. I was inside an apartment on one of the top floor of the WTC. The apartment was huge and took up pretty much the whole floor of the building. I think this, in itself, is a remnant of the studio program on the 93rd floor that I visited in early 2001. The whole floor was pretty open and you could walk from one small artists’ studio to the next and then look out the windows to see Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, New Jersey, and Staten Island. The views were spectacular and harrowingly high. Anyway, the dream: I was in this huge apartment on a top floor and all the well heeled were there – lots of people with a lot of money. And the building was turning slowly, rotating. It was moving clockwise and, by standing next to the large window, you could see the landscape around you. At one point, it picked up a good deal of speed and it was kind of fun and almost unsafe. Then, it was time for dinner and a huge buffet was served on lots of tablecloth covered tables. The food was odd, like a fusion of fusion foods. There was an eggroll that had asparagus stalks sticking out of it. Other finger foods looked unfingerable. The building slowed down around 5:30 p.m. I realized that the building stops spinning around dinnertime so that people could digest their foods more easily.
At a certain point, I didn’t want to be at the party anymore and I left to go down the stairs and I promptly got lost. The stairways were huge and complicated and then I saw concrete tunnels that led to large public areas that were carpeted and pretty, just like they really used to be. Red carpets, a few security guard stations, a couple of fine stores and lots of people bustling around hither and thither. The concrete tunnels were really hard to navigate, though, and every time I got to a concourse, I could not find an exit. When I did find an exit finally, it was blocked by a ladder or some obstruction and I could not get out. I just wanted to go home but there was no way to leave. At some point, I asked someone directions for how to exit the World Trade Center and they pointed me in the right direction, down the red carpeted stairs and then through a small hole and then I was outside. I saw some friends or colleagues outside and we looked at the two buildings, which were now spinning, clockwise, together, quickly. The towers were actually in the water, close to the edge of the island, and they looked very, very large, looming.