The City in the Mountain

I have a recurring dream.  Sometimes there is a mountain range.  Sometimes there is just a mountain.

When there is a mountain range, there is a grand hotel in the old style near the top of one of the ridges.  You and your spouse drive up in your best midcentury cool and uniformed men usher you in.  You can dine, you can dance.  Everything is beautiful.  During the day there are quiet resort activities.  But one other thing you can do is to put on your hiking clothes.  There is a trail that leads over the ridge and deeper into the range.  It ends at a city that ranges down from the high pass over the range.  The city is your destination.  It is a foreign city.  It is not a modern city.  It is Shangri-la or old Kathmandu. It is more foreign than any city in our world could be.  There you are a guest and you speak to the people of the city and they speak to you.  And somehow, groping through your mutual foreignnesses, you acquire some sense of who they are and a small taste of wisdom.  Then you hike back before the sun sets.  On the other side of the pass is a truly foreign land–this city is something like the transition to it–but you can never visit there.

When there is a mountain, the city itself runs down the side of the mountain almost to the very base.

When there is a mountain, in the dream you often begin your visit with an event at a church historical site or some kind of church outingh.  Frequently in the fall, and you see brilliant images of orange and yellow leaves over cool green grass.  Then you all go to visit the city.  Often you don’t even enter, you just go there and have some kind of festivity in the meadows at the base.

But sometimes in the dream it is the summer.  When it is the summer, something very specific  happens.  There is a large festival in the afternoon out at the city and the mountain.  In the morning, you and other interested local people have a smaller festival in the pine-tree uplands south of your town (in the dream, not in real life).  There is a kind of natural meadow amphitheater there and running a short way up the slope on one side there is a small collection of old stone buildings.  Sometimes inhabited, usually not.  A group of your town people occupy the buildings, representing the inhabitants when there are none.  Then another group of men from your town gather at the base of the slope.  But most of you are just watching.  When the festivity begins, the men below rush the buildings and the people in the buildings try to prevent them.  The men rush in a mass and usually make it to the top of the collection of buildings in very little time.  When they do, the thing is done.  But everyone feels cheerful and entertained.  There is a sense of ritual about it, but not what we would call a sense of reverence.  It is fun but also fitting, like guys in tricornes shooting off cannon on the 4th of July.

But that is just the local event.

The main event is held at the city on the mountain.  You can travel out there in time for it to start–it doesn’t start until a little later in the day.  Most everyone is gathered around watching.   A select group of us gather at the base of the mountain.  The festivity is that they rush the city and try to push their way to the top.  While the inhabitants–this city is actually inhabited and the people who live there are very foreign indeed–push them back to try to prevent them.  It is a crazy free wheeling free-for-all.  Sometimes it takes our guys all day.  Sometimes they don’t make it at all.  The city is on a slope and there are hills and things facing it so we can mostly see the whole thing and it is vastly entertaining.  But there is also a sense that something important is happening.

The Lovely One things it is a recurring dream about the temple.  I am not so sure.  The sense of entertainment is strong throughout.  I think maybe it is a dream about something, from a very different angle, that the temple is also about.