Djelloul Marbrook

I have architectural dreams. Every once in a while I find the setting in a book or a movie. One sleepless night I turned on the television set and
watched The Sicilian, a 1987 film directed by Michael Cimino. It opens on a misty morning in Palermo—and there was the morose, dripping architecture of one of my recurrent dreams.

Another time I encounter a Giorgio de Chirico painting (inset) and I have the feeling the artist got something wrong, because I know this scene better than he does. Or I see a photograph of a square in Blida, Algeria, a town I’ve never seen, and I remember crossing the square late one evening about five feet off the ground.

I do a lot of flying in my dreams. Nothing streamlined, kind of loopy like a  swallow, except I tend to pass through walls.

It took me many years to recognize that to my way of thinking these architectural dreams were actually the architecture of my mind. So Cimino’s  glum buildings, which seem never to emit or reflect light, represent a certain demeanor of my thinking. And de Chirico’s pristine, bright  buildings and piazzas, struck with light, represent some kind of post-apocalytpic Turin of my mind, although I’ve never seen Turin, except in photographs and films.

Many people have imagined Persepolis, Antioch, Babylon, and other fabled cities—artists, filmmakers, writers. So of course I have a store of visual ideas about how these places might have looked. But I don’t visit them in my dreams. I do visit marbled Greco-Roman cities, but they’re always empty, perfectly maintained and empty. I have no idea what I’m doing there, no particular feelings. If these Greco-Roman buildings represent a cast of mind, I’ve yet to understand it. I do like whiteness, order, symmetry, grandeur. Perhaps I rest in such places.

—DM