The Dream Hotel
For a long time in my adolescence I dreamed of a hotel. A big, imposing, white hotel surrounded by mountain jungles. These were not pleasant dreams; the hotel had a claustrophobic mood with long cluttered hallways and narrow staircases that ended in flooded subterranean caves. Often I would be pursued; less often would I escape leaping from a window into soaring flight above the trees. The hotel was imposing, disorienting, creepy and possessing no more logic than that I had been there before. It was something of a shock then when I encountered this hotel in real life, in Cuba, in the mountains above Trinidad. I and Rachael—my girlfriend at the time—and some other friends had hitchhiked up the mountains to go swimming in the misty, palm-laden waterfall-pools of a nearby mountain river. We were riding in the bed of a pickup truck when the hotel appeared around a bend in the road, huge and incongruous in that jungle. Built in 1954 by American-backed dictator Batista as a tuberculosis sanatorium for his stricken wife, the revolution had since turned it into a health-spa resort for communist workers. I recognized the building immediately and I couldn’t talk; I thought I was back in the dream.
Meanwhile… The cruel phantasms of hindsight would describe Rachael as the love of my life. We met at a small Christian liberal arts college in Minnesota where the unwritten goal for most students was to get married; “ring by spring” was the freshman motto. Because my parents wanted me to marry Rachael, it is obvious now (twenty years later) that when I broke up with her it was as if I was really breaking up with my parents and the institution of marriage itself. I was not questioning whether marriage was good or bad, but rather why it was so necessary. Everyone had a fever to get married; most of my friends that married then are now divorced; of course we didn’t know any better because repressed christian culture. But the cursed narrative that remained active for many years is that I was supposed to marry Rachael; somehow, out of callousness, cynicism, or stupidity, I had stepped aside from the slow train of destiny. Rachael would marry someone else soon after we broke up. Three months after her wedding she would die in a car accident.
In the years following her death Rachael haunted my dreams. Running into each other at an airport or at a sidewalk cafe we would be very happy to see each other and I wondered if we would date again only to remember that she was married; the dream turned to nightmare when I would realize that she was dead. I would wake up in a shock to relive her death all over again; sometimes she would be standing in a corner of my room. Even when she was not in the room the feeling of her presence was over-powering and would last well into the next day. Recurring over the course of ten years, ebbing and flowing in tidal intensity, the dreams held an invariant structure: reuniting with Rachael who turns out to be a ghost. It was like my dream-life was a hotel in which Rachael kept a room. So the logic of the curse would prevail: I could not accept that she had died/she had died because of me. Persisting in a state of denial—I had refused to look at her body at the wake—I was lost in a phantasmagorical repetition of her death, unable to admit that it was both real and not my fault. The dreams came to an end when, after one final visitation—in a literal hotel room in LA—I wrote her a letter asking her to leave me alone. I would not dream of her again for many years.
