My concept of hell: being strapped to a chair in a room filled with Precious Moments figurines and forced to listen to Bette Midler's "From A Distance."

Last night I dreampt that I was hanging around with William Burroughs. Only it wasn't William Burroughs; it was an impersonator of some kind, although at first I refused to accept it. Instead of books, the pseudo-Burroughs "wrote" ingeniously haphazard, ink-blackened pamphlets (possibly inspired by the underground press depicted in "Perdido Street Station"). Mental snapshots of nonexistent locations, all tarred by dilapidation. I remember a particular rural mansion with crumbling walls and ugly green paint. Strange empty rooms.

I have a barely concealed interest in architectural entropy. It flavors my dreams and haunts my fiction. For more on this bizarre preoccupation, see Abandoned-Places.com. The site's author introduces our collective fascination with derelict structures with the following:

Today, the pyramids of the industrial revolution just uselessly stand in the way, they're a scar in the landscape. The deafening noises have been replaced by silence, but if you listen carefully they will tell you their story.

Abandoned hospitals where you can still smell the anxiety of the ill, where you can hear the coughing of the TBC infected and where once doctors and nurses walked through the shiny corridors.

A 100 years old hotel, standing proudly at the waterfront, arrogantly overlooking the beach and fiercely withstanding all the storms of the past century, a decayed symbol of wealth for the rich.

When a friend first pointed this site out to me, I took a virtual tour of an abandoned hotel and remembered it quite clearly from a recent dream. Decidedly eerie. I've experienced enough episodes of this sort of precognition to almost convince me that there's something to it. Perhaps consciousness is holographic in nature, accessible to humans and non-humans alike. In a holographic model, past and present are meaningless; they're products of our meat-based brains, which evolved in a harsh and mercilessly causal environment.

I'd like to shed my body, if only to taste a moment's raw, unobstructed experience. In my dream of the abandoned hotel, I was surrounded by frollicking humanoid forms. There was something beautifully insubstantial about them. They were somehow diaphanous, child-like, otherwordly -- yet paradoxically perfectly at home among the ruins. I'm not suggesting this was anything other than a dream. But it was a uniquely affecting one, possibly laden with subjective meaning.