Rather than saying I had a dream, I’m going to say – like a mother-tongue Finnish speaker often does – I saw a dream about the WTC twin towers last night. Although I had conversations with surrounding people in the dream, the visuals of it were what made it worth writing about.
This is what I saw:
A new observation tower had been built on Ground Zero in NYC. It was made up of a thin concrete spire, the size of one or two elevator shafts, pendeling with elevators carrying around 5 people. The spire lead to a peculiar observation deck: It was made up of the top stories of both WTC towers, joined together at one of their four corners by a small bridge-like space, which served as the platform onto which people would move onto when getting off the elevators. The upper stories of the (former) two towers, both identical, were empty and very airy spaces with very large windows, and floors that tilted away into all directions from the central platform. The floors were thin, rather large slabs of smooth concrete that seemed to float solidly on top of the several hundred meters of air separating the deck from the street-level. The slabs were not joined together; where I expected to see the seams, there were long, thumb-wide crevasses through which you could see the city underneath your feet.
Although there seemed to be a strong wind blowing, and heavy occasional rain, the feeling in this strange, precarious bird’s nest was of gentle acrophobia. I didn’t seem to mind the fact that occasionally it felt as though you were dangerously walking on air, under an equally pseudo-inexistent steel-embroidered roof. Perhaps this was because I felt that I should make the most of it and stop worrying, I had after all paid to be up there and travelled to NYC with this as one of my ticks on the list. I recall there was a gift shop as well – can’t remember what I got from there if anything. Probably postcards. Or one of these stretched quarters that you could press yourself with a handle-operated machine. I think I’ve still got the one we made in 2000, when me and my family last visited NYC and it’s twin towers, because the queue at the Empire State building was too long (got to say, me and my sisters were disappointed that there wasn’t anyone selling Klav Kalash and crab juice at the WTC plaza. But we did test the toilets).
Can’t wait to travel there again later this year.
