The City of Blades

It's amazing what goes on in one's unconscious mind. We'd been watching a design program about "Top Ten" British designs, in particular the London Underground Map, which gets my vote. I'd been pondering on how simple but practical the design is, and unbeknownst to me, my unconscious mind was also engaged. Several nights later, I dreamt about a vast underground city, composed of huge vertical shafts, many miles deep. In the dream I was following someone walking about their daily business, and knew that the shafts were full of fans; large rotating propellor blades circulating air throughout the city. However, because of the scale, they were rotating fairly slowly, so people could wait at a shaft entrance, step onto one of the passing blades, then get off at another exit.

As I followed the person who had stepped into one of the shaft entrances, I saw a symbol by the door, which was a numeric '5' coloured red, on a blue background. The '5' was tilted slightly to the right, and was designed with a number of 'spurs' coming off the '5' itself.

My very creative unconscious mind informed me that the symbol was a city standard to inform citizens as to the properties of the shaft they were entering. The '5' itself indicated the number of exits, and the spurs on the number indicated their position relative to the current entrance. The angle of the '5' indicated whether the propellor was moving clockwise or anti-clockwise. The colour indicated the relative speed of the blades (ranging from Green=Slow to Red=Faster) and the background indicated the strength of any air current in the shaft according to the scale of the visible spectrum (Red=Strong downdraft or updraft to Violet=Weak draft).

All this happened in a moment - a whole symbol system for a city that doesn't exist (yet). Simple and practical, but currently utterly useless! That's the unconscious for you!

(And for those Kabbalists reading this dream, yes, I know).