I see it in my dreams, or at least, a memory of my dreams: an old hotel emerging from a darkness so complete that it has no visible landscape around it. I must have first dreamt it when I was ten years old, perhaps younger. The date is uncertain; the sense of the place has survived. It belongs to a small collection of old dreams that have remained available to me long after the circumstances of their first appearance have faded. I go there. Even now, that seems the most accurate way to describe the relationship. I remember a building with the familiarity usually reserved for somewhere I have visited, although I could never give anyone directions to it. Its surroundings offer no means of orientation. The hotel provides its own light, and that light is enough to establish a destination. The rest of the world is absent from the scene.
In the image I have made from that memory, the hotel has the character of a building from the 1970s: broad glazing, a low, expansive dining floor, stone beneath the windows, and warm clusters of lights suspended above tables. A car stands outside on a wet driveway. The reflections give the illuminated interior a second, wavering presence on the ground. These details belong to a present-day reconstruction, which gives visible form to something remembered without claiming to recover every original feature. What I wanted to preserve was the vividness. The materials should look tangible enough to touch, even while the setting remains impossible. The darkness is pitch-black, and the hotel seems to emerge from it already complete. There is a peculiar intimacy in seeing so much of an interior while knowing so little about where the building stands.
I saw many hotels when I was young. We moved constantly, and temporary accommodation became part of the ordinary scenery of my life. A hotel has a recognisable purpose wherever it happens to be: there is somewhere to arrive, somewhere to sleep, and an organised interior waiting behind an unfamiliar exterior. Repeated exposure could have made that arrangement especially available to my imagination. When places keep changing, familiarity can attach itself to the kind of building as well as to a particular address. A hotel offers a form of continuity that travels. Its rooms belong to other people before and after a visit, yet for a while they contain the whole practical business of being somewhere. Looking back, I can understand why a building associated with temporary residence might acquire a lasting place in my inner geography.
Years of watching Fawlty Towers belong somewhere in that history. John Cleese and Connie Booth's series, first broadcast in 1975 and 1979, gave me another hotel to become familiar with through repetition. Its reception desk, dining room and stairs formed a compact world in which the same people could be found again. Basil's agitation made ordinary hospitality unpredictable, while the return of the setting made the programme itself familiar. That combination seems relevant to the dream. A hotel can promise that somebody is in charge while leaving the guest dependent on how that person behaves. The series made that social uncertainty visible and memorable, with the reception desk serving as a point at which someone's welcome could become someone else's inconvenience. The building in my dream looks different from Fawlty Towers. What it may share is the feeling that an entire social world is continuing behind the windows, ready to become accessible when I enter.1
The age of the hotel contributes to that feeling. Its 1970s character comes from a period I encountered through television and buildings that were already there when I was a child. The furnishings and lighting carry an adulthood that predates my own experience of being an adult. Through a child's eyes, such an interior could seem established almost beyond question: the tables had been laid, the lights had been chosen, and someone understood how the place worked. In the reconstruction, the warm dining room gives that impression a physical form. The building appears to have been operating for years before my arrival. Its age makes it available as a place with a life of its own, which may help explain why I continue to experience it as somewhere I can visit.
Rock-A-Doodle supplies another recognisable strand. Its journey from the farm to Chanticleer's career as a nightclub singer brings rural vulnerability into contact with a brightly staged world of adult entertainment. The film's remembered atmosphere includes heavy darkness, rain, theatrical illumination and the apprehension of a small creature moving through spaces larger than itself. Those elements seem close to the emotional scale of the hotel. Looking through its windows, I can imagine a room whose activities are comprehensible to the adults inside while remaining mysterious from outside. The resemblance is an association I recognise now, with the film's atmosphere persisting after individual scenes have become harder to place. A film can leave behind a sense of light or a relationship between sizes and spaces after the order of its scenes has become difficult to reconstruct. That is the kind of influence I recognise here.2
There is also a broader Don Bluth sensibility in the image, particularly the willingness to let beauty and vulnerability occupy the same scene. In a 2023 interview, Bluth discussed his interest in stories that acknowledge painful experiences alongside joyful ones, and the effect those experiences have on a young audience. I recognise that emotional seriousness in the atmosphere I am trying to recover. Illumination feels valuable when the world around it has been allowed to remain dark. The hotel has the quality of somewhere a small, exposed traveller might approach, with enough warmth visible to draw them forward and enough uncertainty to sustain their attention. That reading comes from my response to the image. It describes the sympathy I associate with Bluth's work, and the way that sympathy may have informed my own imagination.3
The night scenes in Blackbeard's Ghost contribute something related, although their materials belong to live-action filmmaking. The 1968 Disney film places a threatened inn, an unruly supernatural presence and gambling within the same comic world. Its casino scenes make adult entertainment seem enclosed and self-sufficient, full of activity continuing after dark. Disney's account of the production notes the contemporary jazz used for Silky's Casino, alongside the harpsichord textures elsewhere in the score. What remains with me is that nocturnal atmosphere: buildings lit from within, interiors with their own rules, and ordinary rooms capable of admitting an impossible visitor. In the hotel dream, the people and incidents have fallen away. The association survives in the impression of a place still open while everything beyond its immediate surroundings has become obscure. The casino imagery adds the attraction of an adult world whose activity can be watched before it is understood.4
There is a possible physical counterpart in Canberra. I remember a circular hotel in Deakin, and the former Embassy Motel is a strong candidate for that memory. ABC's report of 6 July 2009, published as the motel was being demolished, describes an early-1960s building whose circular form was conspicuous from Adelaide Avenue. That gives the recollection a plausible local reference. It also places the dream's broadly 1970s appearance within a longer architectural history: a building erected in the previous decade could easily have formed part of the visual world I associate with later hotels. I cannot identify the remembered building with certainty from resemblance alone. Still, the Embassy's documented shape makes it a credible connection, and a reminder that a dream's seemingly invented architecture may have relatives among buildings passed in waking life.5
The chronology remains open. A circular building in Canberra might have contributed to the dream, or it might later have given me a way to recognise something I already carried. The approximate age of the first dream does not establish when every association entered it. I am writing about a memory that has remained with me for decades, during which I have continued to see places, revisit films and think about what I saw. It would be easy to arrange all those influences into a clean account of origin. The surviving evidence supports a looser history. There was an early dream; there were many hotels; there were films and television programmes that supplied an atmosphere. Their relationship has become part of how I understand the place, even where their sequence is uncertain.
Research on dreaming and memory offers a useful context for that uncertainty. In their review Memory, Sleep, and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation, Erin Wamsley and Robert Stickgold describe dream experiences that combine fragments of recent events with older memories and general knowledge. Exact reproductions of waking episodes are comparatively unusual in the work they discuss. Their findings provide a plausible account of how a composite hotel could form. The mind has access to remembered forms and situations without having to preserve their original arrangement. A hotel encountered in travel, the familiarity of a television set and the illumination of a film scene could therefore meet in one imagined location. I find that possibility convincing because the result feels recognisable in several directions at once, without resolving into a single real address.6
Psychoanalysis approaches that density through a different vocabulary. Freud's account of condensation in The Interpretation of Dreams describes how several trains of thought can be represented by one element of a dream. Applied here as an interpretive possibility, the hotel could gather associations that overlap without becoming identical. It can be somewhere to stay during movement, a familiar setting repeatedly encountered on television, and an illuminated interior glimpsed from outside. Those meanings can coexist in the same building. The interpretation begins with the associations I actually recognise, particularly travel and the named screen influences. The wish to enter a place can coexist with uncertainty about what entering might involve. Condensation is helpful because it leaves room for the hotel to carry more than one attachment, including feelings that may pull in different directions. The building's apparent simplicity can hold a complicated personal history.7
The strongest psychological possibility, for me, concerns the relationship between movement and somewhere to return. A hotel normally accommodates a departure already implicit in the stay. In a remembered dream, however, it can remain available across years. For someone who moved often, that could make it an apt setting for an imagined continuity: a place associated with passing through becomes a place that endures. I can read the dream as giving permanence to a familiar form of temporary shelter. The wish involved would be modest and recognisable, the wish that somewhere should still be there when I arrive. A hotel can offer this continuity while preserving the freedom of a guest, who is allowed to belong for a while without having to make a permanent home. In that sense, the dream could hold both an attachment to movement and an attachment to return.
Freud's essay on the uncanny offers a further way of thinking about the setting. His discussion follows the uneasy relation between the homely and the unhomely, and the circumstances in which something familiar becomes disturbing. The hotel lends itself to that vocabulary because its purpose is so ordinary while its surroundings are impossible. I recognise the arrangement of shelter and hospitality, yet there is no visible town to which it belongs. The void removes the geographical relationships that would usually help me understand a building. I am left with familiarity concentrated in one place and uncertainty extending around it. The connection here is aesthetic, leaving the dream's psychological cause open. It helps articulate the experience of a recognisable place appearing beyond the conditions that ordinarily make it recognisable, still offering hospitality in a world whose extent I cannot judge.8
The darkness itself admits several readings. It could evoke the interval between places, especially in a life marked by movement. It could also be a simple consequence of how little of a dream survives: the building remains available while the connective scenery has disappeared from recollection. Within the image, blackness has a practical visual effect as well. It makes each lit window unusually distinct, and the building becomes the only place towards which attention can move. Each reading begins with the scene and the associations I can name. What interests me is how successfully it establishes a destination with so few coordinates. The hotel can be found by its light. Its circular form strengthens that impression in the reconstruction, gathering the illuminated room into a shape that appears complete from the point of approach.
Looking back at the hotel also changes my relationship with the child who first dreamt it. I can recognise some of the materials available to that imagination, while the resulting place retains an independence from my explanation. Watching a familiar programme for years, seeing hotels during repeated moves, and carrying away the atmosphere of a film are ordinary experiences. Their survival in one image gives them an unexpected duration. The hotel lets me approach an early way of attending to the world: noticing the light in a room, feeling the scale of a building, and wondering about the life continuing inside. Even without a remembered plot, the scene contains an experience substantial enough to have remained with me. There is still somewhere ahead, and a lit entrance at which the journey might continue.
This is where I want Old Dreams to begin, with a place I can describe more confidently than I can explain. The series gives those surviving dreams room to be considered through memory, art and the circumstances of a life, while preserving the uncertainty that belongs to them. For this first one, the available connections lead through familiar television rooms, Bluth's illuminated darkness, the nocturnal world of Blackbeard's Ghost and a circular building in Canberra. The hotel has outlasted my ability to establish exactly how those things came together. I must have been ten, perhaps younger, when I first went there. I can still picture the building emerging from the void, already lit, with the feeling that it is possible to arrive.
Sources
1. British Comedy Guide. Fawlty Towers and About Fawlty Towers. Programme dates, creators, setting and production background. Read source
2. MGM+. Rock-A-Doodle. Distributor's film synopsis. Sullivan Bluth Studios' film is the primary work discussed; its visual associations are the author's reading. Read source
3. Purcell, Sammie. In conversation with animation legend Don Bluth. Rough Draft Atlanta, 12 May 2023. Interview with Bluth about experience, emotional storytelling and animation. Read source
4. Fanning, Jim. Did You Know? 8 Spirited Facts About Walt Disney's Blackbeard's Ghost. D23, 8 February 2018. Film released in 1968; production history, casino scenes and musical score. Read source
5. ABC News. Iconic motel torn down. 6 July 2009. Contemporary reporting on the Embassy Motel in Deakin, including its early-1960s construction and circular form. Read source
6. Wamsley, Erin J., and Robert Stickgold. Memory, Sleep, and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation. Sleep Medicine Clinics 6 (2011), 97-108. DOI: 10.1016/j.jsmc.2010.12.008. Author-hosted full text. Read source
7. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Chapter VI, The Dream-Work, section A, Condensation. English text reproduced in York University's Classics in the History of Psychology. Read source
8. Ruers, Jamie. The Uncanny. Freud Museum London, 18 September 2019. Commentary on Freud's 1919 essay and its discussion of the homely, the unhomely and familiar experience. Read source