Running Through Cities That Do Not Exist

I have always been a runner in my dreams. Not always literally — not always with the physical sensation of legs moving and ground passing — but in the sense of someone always arriving, always just having come from somewhere, always with the sensation of forward momentum whether or not the movement is visible. This dream was different. This dream I ran in the literal sense, from the first moment to the last, through a sequence of cities that should not have been connected and were not, on any map I have ever seen, in any geography I have ever studied.

The first city was familiar in the way that dream-cities are sometimes familiar — not recognizable, precisely, not identifiable as any real city in the waking world, but carrying a feeling of having been here before, of knowing the general logic of the place even if the specifics were new. Wide boulevards. Buildings of pale stone. A heat in the air that suggested latitude, southern sun, midday light even though the sky was the specific purple of early evening.

Why I Was Running

I want to address this directly, because it is one of the things that makes this dream unusual. I was not running from anything. This is worth noting because running in dreams is most frequently associated with pursuit — the universal nightmare of being chased, of legs that slow no matter how much you push them, of the thing behind you gaining. I was not being chased. I was not fleeing. I was running because the dream required it, because the cities required it, because this was a dream in which motion was not instrumental but essential — not a way of getting somewhere but the point of the thing itself.

I ran and I was fast. Faster than I have ever run in the waking world — the ground passing at a rate that felt superhuman, my breathing easy, my legs not tiring. The particular pleasure of dream-running, when it is not driven by fear, is the pleasure of a body functioning beyond its normal parameters, of feeling what the body would feel if its physical limits were lifted. I ran and the first city blurred around me and I loved it.

The Seven Cities

Between cities there were no transitions, no travel. I was in one city and then I was in the next, the shift instantaneous, the new city different in every particular from the one before. The first city, with its pale stone and evening heat. A second city that was nothing but glass towers and fog, the fog so thick that each tower appeared and disappeared as I moved, the city revealing itself in segments. A third city that appeared to be built on water — not floating, but constructed directly from the water itself, the buildings made of something that moved slightly even though it held form, something that was water and also not water.

A fourth city of dark narrow streets and overhanging upper floors, medieval in feeling if not in specific architecture, the streets too narrow for vehicles, the only light coming from lamps mounted directly to the buildings at varying heights. I ran through this one in the warm orange light of a dozen lamps and the smell of stone and old wood and something cooking somewhere I could not find. A fifth city that appeared to be a single enormous building, the streets simply corridors of varying width, the sky replaced by a ceiling so high it was invisible, the whole interior world lit from somewhere above by a sourceless grey light.

A sixth city that was mostly sky — low buildings, two or three stories, covering a flat landscape under a sky of extraordinary height and complexity, layers of cloud and color and what might have been other weather systems operating simultaneously at different altitudes. I ran through this one looking up more than forward, the ground almost incidental, the sky the city.

The seventh city was the last. I slowed as I entered it, not from fatigue — I had not fatigued — but because it required a different pace. It was quiet in a way none of the others had been quiet. Empty streets, but not abandoned streets. Swept. Tidy. The lights on in buildings, the sounds of occupation from within. People inside and not outside, at this hour, in this city, for reasons of their own.

The Signs I Could Almost Read

Every city had signs. Street signs, shop signs, direction signs, notices posted at intersections or on building facades. I tried to read them in each city and consistently failed, but failed in ways that were interesting rather than blank. The signs were not in languages I recognized, but they were in scripts that resembled scripts I had encountered — one city had signs that looked like a more fluid version of Arabic, another had something that resembled Japanese katakana but with additional characters, another had a script that was clearly alphabetic but with an alphabet I had never encountered.

In each case I had the sensation of almost understanding. Not of being blocked by ignorance, but of being close — of the meaning being just at the edge of legibility, as if I had been shown these languages briefly at some point and retained a vestigial familiarity without the actual knowledge. It is a specific feeling, this almost-reading, and it is among the more disorienting things dreams produce — the sense of a world that is almost comprehensible, that is almost for you, that would make sense if you just had one more piece of information you cannot locate.

What I Found in the Seventh City

In the seventh city I stopped running. I had come down a wide empty street and found at its end a square — not a large square, intimate in scale, with a fountain at the center that ran with actual water, the sound of it carrying in the quiet. Around the square, low buildings with lights in the windows. A cat on one of the window ledges. A bench beside the fountain.

I sat on the bench. I do not know why the seventh city was the one to stop me when six others had not. Something about its quality — its combination of occupation and emptiness, its sense of a life happening somewhere just out of sight, its fountain and its cat and its swept streets — gave it the particular feeling of arrival. Not destination, exactly. But a pause that was intended rather than accidental. A place to be still in after a long movement.

I sat by the fountain for the remainder of the dream, which was not long. The sound of the water was very clear. The cat watched me for a while, then lost interest and looked at something in the street I could not see. The lights in the windows around the square stayed warm and constant. And I sat and breathed and did not run, and the not-running felt as essential to the dream as all the running had been.

Cities as Dream Symbols

Cities in dreams are among the most complex and variable of symbolic environments. Unlike natural settings, which carry relatively consistent symbolic weight across traditions, cities are products of human culture and their dream meaning is correspondingly more personal and context-dependent. They most commonly represent the social world — the domain of interaction, of role, of the self as it exists in relation to others rather than in itself.

Multiple cities — a sequence of them, visited rapidly — might represent a survey of available identities or available social worlds, a kind of rapid inventory of the different contexts in which the self is asked to operate. In the waking world I move between contexts that require different versions of me — different registers, different emphases, different performances. The cities might be those contexts, exaggerated and made visible.

The seventh city, the one I stopped in, is the most interesting under this interpretation. It is the city that did not require running. The city that felt like it was for resting rather than performing. The city with the fountain and the cat and the quiet. If the other six cities represent the various social contexts I navigate — each with their own language I almost understand, their own logic I cannot quite decode — the seventh might represent something else: the self that exists when the navigation is done, when no performance is required, when the only audience is a cat on a windowsill who looked at you briefly and then found something more interesting.

On Running in Dreams

I want to end with something about the experience of running itself, separate from the cities it carried me through. Because the running was extraordinary. It was one of those dream experiences that gives back something the waking body cannot provide — a version of yourself more capable than the version that wakes, moves more easily, fatigues more slowly, is built for something the waking world does not fully accommodate.

There is a theory among some dream researchers that physical experiences in dreams serve a kind of rehearsal function — that the body, through dreaming, practices and maintains capabilities that waking life cannot fully exercise. I do not know if this is true. But I know that I woke from this dream with a physical memory of running that was as present as any actual physical memory — the swing of the arms, the particular rhythm of the feet, the sensation of forward movement as something natural and joyful rather than effortful.

I have been running in my waking life, since this dream. Not because the dream told me to — dreams do not give instructions, not directly. But because the dream reminded me what it feels like to move through the world with the specific joy of a body doing something it is suited for. Seven cities. One night. A fountain in the seventh city and a cat that looked at me and looked away. I will take what I was given.