“…Nothing was happening here at all. It was a cultural low pressure zone…”
(Male) Bizarre dream. I was riding in a very small car along with my wife. We were lost in a city. My wife was driving and I was unable to give helpful directions.
The city was in the midst of very painful gentrification. There were still old brick skyscrapers around the edges of town, with smashed in windows and graffiti. But down town, there was evidence of new construction. But this evidence felt creepy too. The new buildings were in many different shapes and sizes but all of them were covered in windows. The glass of these windows was a weird, grayish blue and, at least in the dream, I knew that these windows were made by a specific manufacturer and to get permits approved for this city, you had to use these particular windows. Kickbacks with the most obvious and clear kind. Still the effect was breath-taking, like the new city was carved out of some bizarre type of crystal.
But that’s not where we were. We were lost in the “bad” part of town but not bad in the sense that anything actively bad could happen. Nothing was happening here at all. It was a cultural low pressure zone. We saw a couple people but they barely had the energy to sit up or lean against a wall. We turned a corner and heard a half-hearted yelp. We stopped the car and saw that we’d run over a black puppy. It was dead, no hope for it. But a couple yards away there was another puppy, lying by the curb, unable or unwilling to move. A few yards beyond that was a larger dog, the mother. It felt like the creature was dragging itself along, dying but while she was dying, she kept giving birth to puppies that wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves. Some people watched us from across the street but they didn’t speak, didn’t move. If they cared about this horrible state of affairs, they didn’t let on.