
Podcast: Dreamy Audio
Episode: 26
Title: Building New York
Host: Lewis Moten
Release Date: July 4, 2005, 3:14 pm
Restored Date: January 16, 2026
Duration: 4:54
Channels: 1 (mono)
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Encoding: MP3, VBR (~130 kbps)
File Size: 1.2 MB
Summary
In this twenty-sixth Dreamy Audio entry, Lewis Moten recalls a dream that begins with a quiet identity slip—clipping a cat’s nails only to realize they’re his own—before shifting into a vast, luminous art exhibition. Inside a circular, skylit building, teams collaboratively construct a towering wooden model of New York City, blending play, precision, and collective creation.
The dream pivots backstage to a marketplace of meaning, where ornate awards meant for children are shockingly expensive and gated by bureaucracy. Proof of teaching status and institutional frugality is required to buy recognition, turning encouragement into a controlled commodity. The dream ends with departure—art admired, access denied.
Transcript (auto-generated)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Louis Dreamy Audio. Please remember that everything that I say, people, events, and opinions may seem real, but they are not. If you would like to post your own dream interpretations, then feel free to leave a comment on the blog over at dreamyaudio.blogspot .com, or send an email to lewismotten.com. So today I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning in my dream, and I start clipping one of my cat’s fingernails.
This will be Raven, my black cat, and he’s the smaller of the two black cats that I have. They turned out to be my fingernails that I was clipping. I go to the answering machine, and I start playing back messages. And the next thing I know, I’m arriving at a very large building. It’s like an exhibit building for artwork, I suppose. I go in and I meet a lady there that apparently I know, but she’s one of the artists there.
And it’s an artistic competition of some kind. The building is circular inside, very bright, very large. It has a roof with just glass or skylights at the top. And this round area is split off like, I guess, spokes of a wheel for a bicycle or something. But the middle area has a circular column that’s going up a bit. And in each of these areas, people are in teams, and they’re laying down wooden blocks to form the city of New York.
This woman, she’s apparently one of the best ones there with her team. These things are so tall. Well, individual blocks are not tall, but the combined blocks turn out to make building therset so tall that they’re almost as large as she is. And I’m also there with another woman, and we decide to go into the back room. And in one of these back rooms is actually a little store of awards on the walls. You could buy different awards to give out to children.
You would write their name and what they did and hand out an award. And I’m looking, and these things are expensive. They range from $100 to $600, and it’s just so mind boggling expensive in my mind with the price. I mean, they’re very artistic.
They have lots of details. But just to give something to a kid, there’s just way too much value in it. And then I find out a little bit later that they actually come in packs of 50.
So rather than just buying one certificate, you’re buying 50, and it helps with the price a little bit. The next thing I know, the one who came with me starts speaking to a lady behind the counter. And the lady behind the counter is explaining to her that she needs documentation stating that she is a teacher from a school. And on top of that, she needs additional documentation to prove that the school is trying to curb its spending. Very odd that a company or an artist is worried about how much a school is spending when they’re trying to sell something that costs a lot of money. So anyway, we decide to leave the building because it just seems that these people weren’t interested in selling their stuff to anyone off the street. And they certainly weren’t going to sell it to us. Well, that’s all that I have to say about last night’s dream. See you next time.
