I have a recurring dream, which in its recursion is revised over and over. I am under the age of ten, and my parents have driven me through a summer pine forest to the driveway of a beautiful house. It is somehow very large while also being as narrow as any terraced house I have ever lived in. We knock on the door and a man with sandy hair answers and embraces my mum and dad. My sister and I go inside. On the left is a narrow spiral staircase like those found in the towers of old castles, and on the left a corridor which is cool and shaded; unlit by lamps but softly illuminated from a kitchen flooded with natural sunlight at its end. I am never able to go left, toward that light. If the dream is to continue, I always go left up the spiral staircase. At the top I am faced with a corridor lined with doors on both sides. The corridor curves slightly to the left, and the floor rises so that moving forward brings me slightly uphill. The doors on the left side of the corridor are spaced far apart, and I feel that the rooms behind those doors are larger, and that I would need to be invited inside. I walk slowly, as if in awe or reverence, and pick a room to go into on the left hand side, which is crowded with irregularly sized doors that, by their spacing, must lead to any number of narrow rooms I am free to enter as I please.
At the climax of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. there is a strangely experimental chase scene that comes to mind. In the film, monsters in a parallel dimension keep an industrial litany of doors, hanging from floating frames and not set into walls, which serve as portals into the bedrooms of human children. The scene in question: two monsters are attempting to save a human toddler from another cruel monster, and they rush through a warehouse full of doors to escape him. Their pursuer is chameleon-like, and much faster than they are, so their escape has to be made by frantically flinging open doors as portals, entering bedrooms in another dimension, and leaving by other doors in these houses back into the warehouse. The doors are arranged in dizzying cuboid grids that stretch into the top of the warehouse, and an automated assembly line picks doors according to an unseen logic and transports them on rails across the open spaces in between the regular blocks. It is not enough that their characters careen through this space at will. The portals themselves rush up to meet them. When the villain detaches one of the doors from its rail with our two heroes clinging to it we see them, in freefall, frantically attempting to open the door. In the instant after the two are able to climb through it the door crashes to the floor of the warehouse and shatters utterly, dissolving the alien texture of the space and leaving us with a few frames of broken wood and metal.
For the animators of a 3D animated film to set a chase scene in a factory space criss-crossed with rails carrying oblong portals is a stroke of genius. An animated setting always negotiates between our own primitive spatial reasoning and with the radical affordance of projecting a virtual depth out of drawn flatness. Max Coombes, writing about the 1960s short film It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, points out the way its foreground-only pictorial space conditions the eye into noticing the materiality of the drawings themselves. In closeups, the graphite of the pencil outlines, tiny shards of mineral which take up space and are not truly flat, can actually cast faint but discernible shadows between the transparent plastic cels. These make the already deformed, gnomish little children of the film’s subject look microscopic: like little creatures that are immune to gravity in a world ruled by the forces of surface tension. Monsters, Inc. is all digital and virtual, and cannot partake of this kind of materiality. But when the scene is shot through with rectangular holes that open out into other spaces—holes which crucially we can see open and close in real time and through which we can spy differently shaped spaces than if they were simply empty frames—the utterly regular machine precision of digital polygons that comprise the scene’s surfaces admits some veins of dreamy strangeness.
By the time I enter the rooms behind the doors I forget they should be narrow. I might recognise upon waking that I have taken a room from an actually existing house and stitched it into this corridor. Following these threads, I always lose access to the frame narrative of the house in the forest in the end, and act out the dream into another place or time. I have always lived in cities, so any door I pass through might bring me into the city at any point. It is, I have come to believe, a blatant contradiction that the city appears in my dreams as a stable force. The city—and I mean this quite literally in the sense we experience it during our waking hours—is a heaving spongy mass of junctions with practically unlimited topological complexity. But its multiplicity becomes stability in the dream world: any given door that the unconscious casts might lead anywhere, but so often it will lead to the place where there are more doors. The city of dreams is a warehouse of doors. The city of dreams attracts flows by the magnetism of likelihood.
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