Ramon Atila’s DREAM JOURNAL #6

 

Dream Journal #6

I have a station inside me. It is not a place of arrival or departure in any conventional sense, but a recurring, silent cathedral of concrete and potential, a dream that feels less like a narrative and more like a map of my own subconscious. In this space, I descend into a massive, multi-level subway station, a brutalist labyrinth that exists beneath my home city of Montreal. Its purpose is grander, more absurd, than mere municipal transit; this is a clandestine network connecting all the major metropolises of the world. And my recurring role is not that of a traveler with intent, but of a spectral flâneur, a protagonist in a first-person exploration game where the objective is simply to witness the scale of the architecture, both without and within.

The station itself is the first character in this silent play. It is an overwhelming fusion of cyberpunk density and the stark, imposing aesthetic of *Dune*’s Arraken, all rendered in an endless spectrum of brownish, sun-bleached concrete. It doesn’t gleam; it looms. Vast escalators carry me down into depths where the air is cool and still, echoing with the hum of distant, unseen machinery. The platforms are cavernous, capable of holding thousands, yet I am almost always alone. This is the first layer of the dream’s meaning: a infrastructure of immense global connection, designed for faceless masses, experienced in profound solitude. It is the internet made physical—a network promising community while simultaneously architecting isolation.

My destination is often New York, but a New York that has been metabolized by the dream’s logic into something impossibly huge and multi-leveled. The city is no longer a grid but a vertical, stratified maze. I emerge not onto a street, but onto a bridge between skyscrapers, or into a plaza suspended hundreds of feet in the air, the familiar skyline now a canyon wall stretching into a hazy, perpetual sunset. I am a ghost in this machine. I do not speak to anyone, I make no purchases, I have no goal. The pedestrians are soulless entities, their faces a blur, their forms merely environmental details to navigate around. They are the non-player characters in my personal video game, their lack of features a direct reflection of my own disconnection. In a city of eight million souls, the dream enforces a state of absolute anonymity. It is not a fear of others, but a rendering of them as part of the landscape, highlighting my own status as a detached observer.

This journey consistently culminates in the sight of a giant underground parking garage entrance—a gaping maw of shadow and rebar that seems to lead into an even deeper, more profound emptiness. It is the ultimate non-place, a liminal zone designed for machines, not people. It represents a terminus, not of the journey, but of purpose itself. To enter would be to accept a final, meaningless destination, to become truly lost in the system. And it is at this precipice, as the brown concrete turns a deeper ochre in the sunset, that I instinctively retreat.

My choice to return home is as telling as the journey out. I opt not for the mysterious, efficient, subterranean network, but for the bus. And with the dream’s peculiar, literal magic, it is a New York City bus, its familiar, grimy exterior a jarringly mundane artifact in this epic landscape. That this symbol of hyper-local, stop-and-start transit is the vessel for an international connection back to Montreal is the dream’s most poignant contradiction. It rejects the sublime, hidden network for something slower, more tactile, and above-ground. It suggests a longing for the surface, for the world as it is seen, not as it is engineered. The bus ride is as silent as the subway; I speak to no one, I see no faces. The connection is made, but the isolation remains intact.

This recurring dream, in its essence, is an essay my mind writes about the modern condition. I am a citizen of a globally connected world, with the means to digitally “teleport” to any city, to access any culture. Yet this connection is often passive, observational, and deeply lonely. The station is the promise of globalism; the faceless crowd and the parking garage abyss are its experiential reality. I am the video game protagonist because my engagement with this vast world is often that of a player—curious, directionless, and insulated from genuine interaction, safely separated by the fourth wall of the screen.

The concrete is the color of dried earth, of something both ancient and unfinished. It speaks to a future that is not shiny and chrome, but weathered and monumental, a world where the infrastructure of connection has become our most dominant, impersonal landscape. I travel the world only to find myself standing at the edge of a parking garage, and then I take the long way home, on a bus, alone with the setting sun. The dream is not about the anxiety of being disconnected, but the profound, silent strangeness of being connected to everything, and yet, to nothing at all. The station is in me, and I am, perpetually, its only passenger.

AtilA