The Fabulous Riverboat

This started out in the Vancouver house (lived in from about '71-'76), a colonial "barn-shaped" affair on a hill. Fond memories! Anyway...in the dream much larger and more elaborate on the inside than it ever was or could be! Room after room decked out in opulent baroque Victorianism. Looking for "my" room. Then it became the Greek revival house my friend Julie lived in with her second husband, only, again, much larger and more elaborate on the inside. I am staying there, and Julie has offered me the master bedroom...but where is it? I wander from floor to floor and around the perimeter (the center of the house is occupied by a huge stairwell and elevator). I used to know where it was... Room after room, all in different color schemes but all elaborately Victorian, some orientalist, some baroque, some Medieval...but where's my room?

As time goes on people gradually begin to appear moving through the house and it starts to become more of an old hotel with many floors and specialized rooms: music rooms, libraries, studies, smoking rooms, billiard rooms, rooms of curiosities. I can see out the windows to a panorama very like Puget Sound. Now Gordon is with me, but we still can't find our room. Sometimes we think we've found what we're looking for, but somebody else will be there, or upon entering it will be not quite what we expected. Many of the rooms have elaborate canopied beds in them, sometimes several to a room, with mottoes and heraldic inscriptions above them.

Eventually this building becomes a ship, still very late 19th century. A steamer moving through Puget Sound. We pass through a gorgeous dining salon and out onto a stern-facing deck. The boat churns to a stop, then reverses engines and starts madly backing up a river! We're going to run out of water! Before that can happen the propellers start to spin off the shafts (too much backing, I guess). It's a quad screw, and one by one they thrash off. The shafts spin way up: "The engines are going to blow if they don't throttle down!" We dash for the stern, trying to get as far from the engine room as possible. Sure enough, there's a huge explosion of steam and shrapnel. The ship must surely catch fire at this point! The shore is near, so we're not really worried. We'll just wait for the boat to settle a bit then swim for it...