Musings on the Urban Dreamscape

Psychogeography acknowledges the relationships between people and spaces. How does a particular area or environment come to have meaning? What effect do places have on those who move through them? Upscale neighborhoods give us different feelings from ghettos, all the more so if we happen to live in one or the other. Bustling urban areas affect our energy in entirely other ways from peaceful, rural gardens.

We are all unconsciously psychogeographers. We seed the places we move through with meaning, overlaying our surroundings with associations, perceptions, and reactions. I giggle every time I pass the Millberry Building on the UCSF medical campus near our apartment, where my spouse and I once drunkenly had sex outside, barely concealed by a pillar. The rows of Victorian houses in my neighborhood seem stately and elegant. They remind me to hold myself erect and poised. I go out of my way to avoid the McDonald’s when I walk down to Haight Street.

Practicing psychogeography is about becoming conscious of how your environment affects your emotions, your energy, your behavior. Mindfulness matters in psychogeograpical pursuits. We walk through the city immersed in interior monologues, I need to buy some tomatoes, did I remember to turn the heater off?, I wonder what he meant when he said that. Undertaking a psychogeographical practice entails becoming aware instead of the city around you, and its effects on you. Practicing psychogeography is also about performing actions that change your relationship to your surroundings, to your urban space. Public art, localized political action, spontaneous interaction with the environment: these things can all change how we move in the spaces around us.

Urban Dreamscape: SF is a conscious psychogeographical practice. When I weave my dreams into my environment, I add layers of memory and experience into the city. A stroll to the store brings me back through the narratives of my sleeping psyche, to the deepest parts of my unconscious. The traces I leave on these places in the form of the representations of the dreams done by various artists also affect my relationship to the place, and perhaps also changes how those places affect anyone who sees this site (such as you).

The Situationists—a post-surrealist movement of artist anarchists who helped foment the 1968 uprising in France—engaged in a conscious psychogeographical practice they called the Dérive (French for drift). This constituted a meandering ramble through the city, the “technique of locomotion without a goal.” The walker moves without motivation or destination; she drifts. Whatever the terrain offers determines the experience; attraction or repulsion to features or architecture show the drifter his path or provoke emotions, reactions, and thoughts. Often undertaken by small clusters of people drifting together, the Dérive generated group awareness of urban spaces. Myriad ways that the city influences its citizens were thus made visible. The Dérive reveals the psychic map of an area. Or else it creates that map. Meaning itself is a human construct. It exists because we create it.

We are practicing psychogeography together right now. Because you’ve read this text and perhaps looked at some of my dreams, your view of the city may change. If you’re in San Francisco, and you walk through the Upper Haight, Cole Valley, parts of Golden Gate Park, or the Inner Sunset, you’ll pass through my dreams, layered over top of the architecture. Maybe you’ll notice them. Maybe you’ll add your own layers on top of them, or else seed something else in your neighborhood. The feedback loop between you and your environment creates meaning.

Maps are not the complete and unbiased representations they pretend to be. Every map has a purpose; in fulfilling its purpose, every map leaves out way more than it includes. The MUNI bus and subway map for San Francisco shows streets and mass transit routes but leaves out topology, population density, notable geographical features, ethnic and religious break down of inhabitants, etc. As much is not said as is said, and in this we can read a lot about messages not made clear but implied by the map. Muse for a moment on all the world maps you’ve seen with North America smack dab in the middle. Such a simple statement, and so subtle.

Our private mappings work the same way. I drive a heavy VW camper van with an ancient transmission. She doesn’t like hills. My ideal map of San Francisco would show the inclines and the valleys, highlighting roads that grade gradually or wind through the flat parts of the city. That same San Francisco map would pinpoint locations of a lot of really good, pricey restaurants, funky used clothing stores, and secondhand book shops. We all navigate by maps in our heads that starkly resemble the touristy joke “New Yorker’s Map of the Country” that depicts Manhattan taking up 50% of the country, its buildings and landmarks looming large, while the Midwest takes up only a tiny spot sandwiched between Texas and California.

I really like cats. When I walk through my neighborhood, I favor paths that take me by friendly felines: the dotty black cat at the bottom of the hill; the two calicoes who laze in the garden on Carl; the perpetually yowling gray tabby who can’t believe I won’t let him in but who purrs loud as an outboard motor when I pet him.

My friend Eric lives a couple blocks over. He works at a hot rod magazine. We compared notes once on our favorite neighborhood spots and I happened to mention the mother daughter calico cat garden. He puzzled for a while about where I meant, so I described the yard, set back from the sidewalk, bordered by sunflowers. “Oh yeah!”, he finally exclaimed, “that’s across the street from where the yellow 66 Corvette parks!” Turns out that Eric’s awareness of neighborhood cars rivals my knowledge of neighborhood cats. We exchanged mental maps, and now I see an impressive number of vintage vehicles and mopeds parked in local driveways.

Urban Dreamscape: SF is a imaginative cartography, a map of both my psyche and my most immediate surroundings. The largest clusters of dreams gather around the paths I walk most often and lay over top of features I find attractive or interesting. Sometimes, when I want to see (or avoid) a particular dream, it determines my route. My greatest hope for this site is to foster exchange of mental maps. If you have a map of your own that complements or overlays my own, tell me about it. My goal is to ultimately create a community project, to open a space for people to juxtapose their psychogeographical explorations. Once (if) I receive feedback, I’ll begin a new part of this site devoted to communal pursuits. What are the maps in your mind?