Flights of Fancy

In which my subconscious draws from a real place I didn't know existed until now

In my dream last night, a luxuriously domed Los Angeles hotel in which Ian and I were staying had a hybrid staff of people and robots. The robots were not intended to look human, though they did wear elegant-looking porter uniforms — fitted jackets with shiny silver buttons, pert little hats — but their faces were eyeless and smiling, textured like stretched nylon, and their hands looked like fleshly mittens. After I checked in with the friendly human staff at the front desk, I was directed to a separate lobby that would lead to our room. There was a chalkboard in that lobby, and in front of the chalkboard, one of these tall porter-robots stood at the ready.

When it clocked me with its robot-vision, its arm started to move, and its mitten-hand gripped the chalk, and wrote “Hi Sarah,” on the chalkboard, in familiar-from-school white chalk letters. I felt a low-grade but unignorable panic and asked, “How do you know my name?”

It wrote something on the board that was intended to be a generalization — I can’t remember what — about “LA Sarahs.” I felt irrationally triumphant that it had gotten my birthplace wrong. “I’m not from LA,” I told it. It didn’t move or respond. Ian, who was standing next to me, told me that arguing with this robot was likely fruitless. I suddenly started to entertain the thought that the robot had picked up on my brainwaves, which have been directed toward LA since January when the fires started, but even moreso as dystopian terror becomes our day-to-day American reality, with hardworking people shoved into unmarked vans by masked state-sanctioned thugs, forced into detention camps, sent to faraway prisons, warned away from their workplaces, their children kept fearfully away from parks, schools, public pools, churches. If I think about LA more or less constantly, does that make me an “LA Sarah”? I doubt it, but I wondered about the robot’s reasoning. Then I stopped wondering about its reasoning because it’s a robot.

Tech in this dream didn’t end with our robot-bellhops, though. Before we checked in we’d been taken to a virtual reality launch pad that was — without headsets or any visible equipment — supposed to simulate the feeling of hurling off a plank and flying across the Pacific Ocean. That’s exactly how it felt, and it was incredible. One of my favorite risk-sensations is a dramatic drop from a great height, and this feeling was closer skydiving to than to a drop tower. I felt exhilarated and I loved this hotel, which, quick research tells me, looked exactly like the Boyle Hotel in East LA, a building I have never seen or heard of. Even the interior photos I’ve scanned look accurate to my dream: that’s odd. I doubt “I dreamt about this place, this exact place,” is the stuff that successful research grants are made of, but I’ve also found that one way to cope with the unprecedented uncertainty of our current moment is to imagine that anything is possible.

What made this dream most pertinent to Hot and Disabled is that I was either walking with crutches or in a wheelchair during the whole of it, and that’s unusual: rarely, if ever, do I use crutches in dreams, but they were continually relevant because I had a lot to carry, in the form of complementary gifts bestowed upon me by the human front desk staff, and the bags kept splitting. I don’t remember what was in the bags but it all kept falling out. Given that Ian was with me on this trip, I have no idea where he was — I can always count on him in the waking world to carry anything that would be an undue struggle for me, but I think he had a Zoom meeting or something. The most mundane aspects of conscious life can intrude aggressively in dreams.

My health has been out of whack lately, making these past couple weeks more sedentary than they’d otherwise be at this time of year, and maybe that’s why my subconscious graced me with wild scenic drop tower flights and a brief trip to the Boyle Hotel, shimmering the way that it might if it were featured in one of Francesca Lia Block’s descriptions of LA. Having been forced to talk down LLM/generative AI enthusiasts one too many times because they occupied high-up positions at the University where I was last employed, I feel more done than done with that “debate,” but it’s a lot more fun in the form of possibly-telepathic robot porters at a luxury hotel, especially since they worked alongside the humans, who seemed genuinely happy with their positions there.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt compelled to share a dream with you all, and I tend to have mixed feelings about reading dream-sequences. Generally, I find them either too cohesive to pass for a dream or too incoherent to add to the rest of a written work. When I think about a beautifully-done dream sequence, one that feels like a dream when you’re watching it, I come back to this scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, courtesy of the brilliant screenwriter Marti Noxon.

Do you like reading dreams? Do you pointedly dislike reading dreams? I’m especially grateful for your attention if you fall into the latter camp and have made it this far. In high school, my then-boyfriend dreamt about a pixie he had fallen in love with (the moment that he understood her to be a pixie was a bodyshaking revelation) and woke up heartbroken that she didn’t exist and made me listen to his borderline-weeping laments that he could never be with her. That didn’t do wonders for my self-esteem, but few aspects of that relationship did, which is probably why I’m still talking about it now.

Anyway, I hope things have been as fulfilling as possible with you — healthwise and beyond — as summer makes itself fully known in this hemisphere.

The hotel of my literal California dreams