Explanation for the Title

I have very vivid and elaborate dreams. I dream in all senses, including pain, temperature, and feeling of fullness upon eating fully-tasted dream-food. Most of the time I take joy in this, though nightmares bring uncommon terror. It helps with ideas, though most of my ideas I get lying in bed waiting for sleep, rather than during it.

Over the past few months I have been dreaming in the same location that feels, unlike any other dreamscape, like something I constructed. Something that's mine in a profound sense no physical object can be. If I had a physical mansion it would belong also to the architect who designed it, and the constructors who mortared each brick in place, and the real estate agent, and the plumber, and the bank that gave me the huge loan this physical place would have cost. But this I made, every bit, as natural as breathing.

It has many, many floors. I don't know how many. There are no grand staircases, but instead a mishmash of spiral stairs, stone steps, ladders of the pull-out kind and the wood kind and the rope kind. Books line many walls. The lighting is warm. Sometimes I run into a living room like one from a house I lived in the waking world. There are many bedrooms, some what interior designers would call "vintage eclectic" with velvet hangings and lots of weird/delightful knicknacks on shelves, some clean and Asian-inspired, white sheets and bamboo and silk screens. I'm pretty sure there was a steampunk kitchen somewhere.

In the basement there's at least one fully staffed and operational bistro, and further down many flights of steps there's a canyon floor reminiscent of Bryce Canyon in Utah (or indeed may landscapes in the Utah/Arizona/New Mexico area, swept curved by water and wind). When I went to the Canyon there were lots of young people having furtive sex in the shadows; I let them because it was consensual and safe.

One night I dreamed that my Mansion had been condemned as unsafe, and oh! how we fought for it. We picketed and hunger-struck, and one of the many residents - whose faces I almost always forget upon waking - had to be dissuaded from using Molotov cocktails against the bureaucrats. We must have one. I don't know how.

I occasionally have to throw unwanted turn-ups out. Last week Tom Cruise was there and I angrily told him that John Barrowman (whom he very faintly resembles) is far sexier and manlier than he could ever be, and does the whole action-hero-thing in an order of magnitude better, despite Barrowman being an openly gay frequent star of musicals. Cruise dumped his glass full of ice water on me.

But I do bring guests from my waking life in as well. And that's why this blog is named after the Mansion - I want it to be the meeting place between me, the writer, and you, the reader. If you don't manage to access it full-bodied with your dreams, then please take the slower route of imagining it.

We are seated in a room full of comfy couches and velvet pillows. Would you like a drink? Want me to make a fireplace? Any ideas on how I should decorate?

Welcome.