I drive around San Francisco. Discover that during the pandemic, while we all stayed in and weren't looking, the skyline changed some.

Quite a bit. I'm no longer sure what the tallest structure in town is.

One new tourist attraction is on the Bay shore, just below Ghirardelli Square: an extravaganza well over 200 meters high and at least as wide (700+'). Looks like a Japanese torii on acid, or a Victorian trellis of wooden lace. Only... covered in carved, luridly painted Chinese gods & dragons.

And it's not even the biggest new structure. High in the wooded central hills, there's a crazy tower/hotel 2-300 m tall & wide, branching like flower stalks into a dozen Space Needles, flying saucers on stilts. Above all, a central balloon; and above each saucer-penthouse, huge umbrellas pulse open & shut as if the whole thing's a hydra with jellyfish for heads.

Really odd. What architect thought that was sensible?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Chinese folly/trellis/torii 200+ meters high: whaaaat?
• Even bigger pulsing jellyfish-hotel in central hills: the locale suggests Sutro Tower, which is about the right size and weird-looking--but not so bizarre as my dream-tower.
• Second tower's central balloon: two nights ago, saw a bit of the new BBC show Around the World in 80 Days. The first leg of the trip is by balloon; they find theirs, inconguously, in the center of a Parisian courtyard. That's about the only element of the dream that DOES make sense to me.

NEXT DAY

A book arrives at the library for me. On Ursula Le Guin's recommendation, I ordered Hav, a strange novel that most readers mistook for nonfiction since Jan Morris is a travel writer; in Hav, she invents a small Mediterranean state with a bewildering history, culture and politics. That's her point; even the locals don't fully grasp their own society. Are we so sure we grasp ours?

And there's the Chinese folly from my dream! The Pagoda, the world's largest, 200 meters high, feverishly carved painted and decorated by some eccentric centuries ago.

The grotesque hydra-balloon-medusa hotel? In Hav's part two, set twenty years later, the Pagoda's burned in a coup, and now the city's dominated by the grotesque, futurist Myrmidon Tower. It's an emblem of world capitalism--and Big Brother.

I felt Jan Morris successfully updated Orwell in that section, catching the flavor of a modern surveillance state--"friendly" yet creepy, surreal yet tacky, cultish yet opaque--who's in charge? The only thing close to it is Patrick McGoohan's old BBC series The Prisoner with its "charming" seaside resort you can never, ever leave.

But of course any tale seems more resonant if you dream about it--your unconscious mulls it over & brings out its full grotesquerie.

It's just that usually such dream-deepening happens after you read it--not before.

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