The night of my first day of college, I dreamt I missed class because I got lost. I’m told such a dream is common, and that most people at some point have them. You know what I’m referring to: the panicked, dizzying point in a dream where you begin to realize the halls don’t make any sense, that it’s five minutes past the beginning of class, and that you seem to have been plopped, like Theseus — sans life-saving spool of string — into a labyrinth of uncertain dimensions. I felt like I was being followed, even. Not by a Minotaur, but by the prospect that I may never find my class, that I might just wander the confusing, dead-end halls for the rest of my short life.
I had this dream after experiencing LNCO, the Languages & Communication building on the U campus.
One of the most confusingly designed buildings to ever have graced the U’s hallowed ground — second only to that agora of lost souls, the architecture building — LNCO is a veritable twist of misdirection. At any point past the entrance you might find yourself enclosed in a small atrium-like box of walls, stared down at by professors holed up and too afraid to leave the surety of their offices, or else facing a set of stairs up which you could have sworn you saw Jack Nicholson creeping in “The Shining.”
The only thing you can be sure of when entering LNCO is that the English department is on the third floor, though the concept of ‘floors,’ ones which follow the pattern of being stacked one on top of the other, seems to have been utterly lost on the designers of this tormented building. Granted, having been built into a low hill, it might be understandable that finding an entrance which leads to a logically placed section of the building would be difficult. Although, of course, LNCO could hardly be accused of ever attempting to make the lives of its occupants any easier.
In my dream I met a Sherpa who I thought might explain to me the many oddly-placed benches or the fact that doors which lead to entire sections of the building seem to lock and unlock of their own volition. Alas, the Sherpa was as lost as I. Together we discovered ferns wedged randomly in unassuming corners, hallways so narrow we had to shuffle single file, roundabout bits of corridor down which we wandered for hours, never realizing the recursive circle in which we traveled. When the Sherpa and I departed company, I was somehow sure we would never meet again, each of us doomed to wander, fog-bound, in our sequestered sections of what I then began to understand was the physical incarnation of an infinite, inescapable purgatory.
It was then that I awoke with that jolt of panic which usually marks the end of terrible nightmares.
The rest of the semester I was haunted by my vision of being trapped in LNCO. The building is, not to put it too hyperbolically, an enigma. It is where sanity, like an old elephant at the end of its tether, goes to die.
There are buildings on campus, no doubt some you’ll find you have class in, that resemble the discordant mesh of brick, drywall and glass that compose LNCO. The only advice I can give to those entering freshmen and all-too-cocky upperclassmen, is get to class early the first week. This way you might save yourself from being marked late, or, better yet, you might be able to have pleasant dreams and restful sleep, free of Sherpas and free of endless hallways.