Case #117: Recurring dream of a place (Prague) years before going there
Many Czech emigres in Toronto say they had the same recurring dream in the 1980s as this Canadian writer, Paul Wilson. He describes walking the dark winding streets of Prague and meeting his old friends there, but always in fear of being found by the police.
He describes the semi-nightmares as intense, "hyper-realistic" nocturnal voyages through Prague, with a "powerful erotic undertow linked to a mounting sense of anxiety." Each version of the dream ended with a panicked and ultimately foiled attempt to leave town, whether by rail or air or just walking away. Wilson had lived there in the 1960s and 1970s, and had been forced to leave by the communist police like so many Czech writers and artists and activists.
It is, Wilson writes, the "émigré dream" — common to those forced to leave their homeland because of political events. His specific dream, though, is very familiar to me. I also began having this dream in the 1980s, toward the end of the decade. The thing was, I had never been to Prague and didn't know a soul there. In fact, I didn't know where the dreams took place until December of 1991, when I broke off from my traveling buddy to take a train to then-Czechoslovakia on my own.
It was my first European adventure, and I very much wanted to explore post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe. And anybody following the news of that era wanted to see this place where Vaclav Havel had gone from political prisoner to president. But I knew nothing substantial about that part of the world and it was long before the era of Flickr and Google Mapping your journeys before they took place.
Still, as I walked Prague's old town that night, with everything I owned on my back, I was actually in this recurring dream. I'd probably had it a couple of dozen times, or at least I remembered it that many times. There were very specific qualities to the light spilling out from occasional windows, and the feel of the buildings, and the paths of slushy footprints over the cobblestones, the mysterious voices from the few people I heard talking — people still spoke very quietly to each other as they walked together.
It gets dark early, so close to winter solstice, but I still wandered around so long that there was only one accommodations kiosk open back at the train station when I finally returned in need of cheap lodging. (In exchange for $25 U.S., they sent me to some dusty panelak apartment in either Prague 9 or Prague 19, with a vast half-frozen mud parking lot between the last tram stop and the concrete apartment tower.)
I continued wandering the Staré Město those next few nights, looking for things I "recognized." And this led me into the third floor apartment shared by five or six random travelers and stragglers, with a weird angular chaise lounge/ottoman thing available for I don't know how much, a hundred dollars a month. The German landlords in Berlin were doing well with this fixed-rent place, I mean. It was my first flat in Prague, and the best neighborhood by far.
