Vincent Van Gogh, Corridor in the Asylum
I meet different groups of executives each week somewhere in the world and in many very different hotel and conference environments. Over time, you become a connoisseur of learning spaces and hope that the next one will be the one to beat. Sometimes, the rooms are magnificently well-suited to learning and dialogue but, more often, they aren’t, and I have to somehow make it right.
In spite of the design variability, the one thing all conference sites have in common, however, are corridors: the channels that “set the stage” as you walk from one part of the building toward your meeting room. Corridors are taken for granted. We walk almost obliviously through them with focus on what lies just up ahead.
Despite the forgotten qualities of corridors, they are important physical passageways designed to stretch time between awakening and the formal meeting. Corridors extend time to adjust the brain to coming social experience, offer a moment’s solitude before a time of energetic interaction, and a chance to get centered. All this is the preamble to the coming transition to more public space, not as easily transited but demanding shared thinking and astute listening. But, what is the impact on the psyche if the room at the end of the corridor is itself a corridor.
The hotel in which I stayed last week in Barcelona for a leadership development meeting, hosted us in their only conference room. It was, in a word, peculiar. While I appreciated the room-length array of windows with all the light they provided, it disappointingly looked out directly on the less than picturesque sidewalk and street just outside the front of the hotel.
The really odd feature, is that this room was exceedingly narrow. We accommodated 14 people, but, we had to get close enough to the front of the room to see the slides. The room looked like it was once an actual corridor converted into a conference room. When I first laid eyes on it, I thought the space would be cramped width-wise, but we made it work out.
The hotel design itself was eccentric and the usual amenities were absent (though the people were always affable and hospitable):
- no iron or ironing boards available in the rooms at all, just an ironing service for a fee;
- a bed lower to the ground than I’ve seen in a very long while;
- a mattress just slightly more comfortable than lying down on the floor;
- very lean non-supportive pillows;
- an oddly-tiled floor that was always cold;
- wireless internet but for a hefty daily fee;
- no room service until 9PM; and
- no business center, or terminal to print out a boarding pass for one’s flight.
I have, over the years, stepped into a range of quirky meeting and hotel environments. For this very reason, I insist on seeing the room the night before I use it. In this way, I can consider what I might need to do to make it feel as comfortable as possible, and conducive to relaxed dialogue.
Adding insult to injury in this instance, I found the room laid out as one large rectangular table in boardroom style. This was way more formal than I had envisioned, so we redid it using table rounds that sat 4 people each.
As I look back on it, many similar experiences come to mind of hotel environments reserved for sessions like this one. I invariably spent several hours rearranging tables, flipchart easels, thinking through where to place various wall hangings, set up a table for materials, one for a coffee, tea and snack station, and a reading desk with pertinent books. It is time spent visualizing alternatives and playing with one after another potential room configuration.
It occurs to me that the frequent surprise I get on arrival to a site, and on first entering the assigned conference room, presents considerable spiritual value. In the 21st Century, leaders need to absorb and adapt to increasing amounts of uncertainty, and do so at ever faster rates. Having this variability present itself so often, makes necessary the very mindset needed in these times: optimal flexibility, resilience, creativity, visualization capacity, and realistic optimism. Without these, change would be an exercise in continuously feeling insecure in the face of emerging realities, and forever a cause for melancholy.
The more I think about all this, the more I realize that I have come to simply expect curve balls, shocks, design eccentricities, and simply odd spaces. Of course, deviations from expectation is all the greater when traveling internationally.
It’s all good, though, and presents a chance to grow ever more unflappable, innovative, think faster, and learn to enjoy the smuzzle puzzles. As we navigate change and surprise, we have the refining opportunity to hone our inner “MacGyver,” and take on the perpetually shifting sands with grace and the heart of adventure and invention.
“The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one’s “own” or “real” life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.” C.S. Lewis
© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
The Harried Mystic 
I’ve taught many times now in a corridor; the key is to be more interesting than the things going on around one! It’s all about adapting to whatever life throws at one; I have also taught on trains, coaches, playing fields, beaches, woods and even a few car parks!
What does dreaming about corridors mean, and going up endless staircases?
LikeLike
Hi Viv. Corridors are passageways into which rooms open, and the word conjures especially narrow passages. They connect places where we come to rest after travel, whether places to sleep or meeting rooms of one sort or another. As such, we can expect that the dream is making reference to the character and import of a journey or seeking after something in one’s life. Most important would be any details about the corridor that were unnatural qualities for corridors to have.
As for staircases, we would need to know more about what kind and any elements that distinguish it from what we would again expect. For example: how wide is the tread, the riser, winders, trim, any handrail and what kind? As far as direction of travel is concerned, going endlessly up the staircase suggests an effortful and possibly exhausting process.This would all of course need to be placed within the context of the events in real-time surrounding your days. In any event, these are very powerful symbols. Archetypally, corridors are emblematic of mystery, adventure, unfolding, being in-between, possibly lost, or in transit. Stairs connote initiative, ambition, purposive behavior, commitment, intent and labor. All the best.
LikeLike
The corridors are usually quite blank and empty and dark. It often feels like an abandoned building, with weird things left behind in ruins.
The staircases are often the back stairs you find in grand houses or hotels, carpetted with worn carpet and often dusty. I am often trying to seek my own room without knowing where it is or even if it exists. I am going up but there doesn’t seem to be any landings to turn off and explore. Sometimes this is a trigger for a dream to be lucid and make me stop and either go down or conjure up an exit. I feel a sense of claustrophobia, and a desperate need to see the outside sky, and not roofs and ceilings. Sometimes I find doors that appear to lead outside but are illusions.
The one that haunts me the most is the dream where I find within a familiar building a secret or hidden door that somehow I must always have known was there but didn’t know, and which leads to another and often bigger part of the house that is left as if someone has just gone away. There are beds left as if the owner has only just got up. IT’s all strangely familiar and yet unfamiliar, like a house occupied in infancy but viewed again in late adulthood.
Some of the houses are packed with hidden treasures, things I have lost and now find again, with great sorrow and great joy all mixed up. Some are just ruins, left to rot.
LikeLike
Viv, you wrote: “Sometimes I find doors that appear to lead outside but are illusions.” This captured my attention especially in view of the statement about feelings of claustrophobia. The imagery here is striking: a process of being ” faked out” by what appears to be an exit that turns out to be false. It conjures up broken promises, disappointed expectations, and a sense of being trapped in circumstances. Almost in reply to this riddle, you recollect the “haunting” dream of discovering the secret door leading to a bigger part of the house “left as if someone had just gone away.” I find myself wondering if that someone is you: a more expansive house filled with hidden treasures awaiting your return to reclaim them. It feels as if the claustrophobic staircases with their illusory egresses to the out of doors are an expression of your yearning for more unfettered space in your own life: space that is waiting to be revealed when you open the “secret or hidden” door. The question is – What is that secret door? I might suggest staying with the image of the secret door and the articles/ treasures to be found in that larger part of the house to which it leads.
LikeLike
I feel a bit shivery as I write this because too much seems to be hitting the mark.
It’s quite hard to respond to, because so much of what I have tried has been in an attempt to reach that world, that me on the other side of the secret door.
I confess also that while I have been having versions of this dream off and on for many years, when we moved house to our current location, to a much smaller house, I woke at night most nights convinced there must be another room that I somehow had to access. I walked into walls and doors in my semi-somnabulant state, trying by force of psychic will to find that way through, to no avail. I could not make that psychic reality a physical one.
I feel a lot of the time as if an almost tangible barrier, like a wall of stone has been built somewhere deep inside me, blocking me off from…from what? I do not know. Every piece of work on self, meditating in varying guises, from shamanic journey work to simple contemplation brings me again and again to the same point of utter unmitigated failure.
You write;”broken promises, disappointed expectations, and a sense of being trapped in circumstances.” How true that is.
LikeLike
Here’s the real paradox? You’ve already broken through the wall and you found the secret door. It led to that larger part of the house. You did so in the dream. Who narrated the dream? Who saw it from above? That one knows the truth.
We keep seeking the answers to the riddle, but part of us already knows the answer. We are watching the seeking part of ourselves from atop a height. We are both lost and found. Like a movie or any good book, the story goes on and we enter into it fully, and yet we know, in those instances, that we are reading or watching at the same time. As you work with dreams, as you are here, the narrator, the one who has seen the whole story as if from above, fills in the missing pieces. This is what I mean by staying with the image of the door and the things found in the larger part of the house to which it opens. Your unconscious imagery will reveal the greater detail, ironically, with less effort than we tend to expend on other practices. Put differently, the writer in you knows the way through life’s labyrinth if we allow her to write freely, spontaneously.
As I think about the feeling of a “wall of stone” the puzzler in me asks: What are my options in encountering such a wall? I can try to climb over it, or dig under it. Both of these options involve great effort. Alternatively, I can try punching a hole through it, but that is likely to be harder still. Then again, I could turn and walk away (but that would mean never satisfying my quest for the other side), or walk along the wall’s length until it is no more, then cross over to the other side. More often than not, the way ahead is the one that occurs to us last. Walk along the wall until it ends. Then, cross over. In terms of practice, we can invite our dreaming to explore the walls, examine them, and allow the mind to wander along their perimeters. Undoubtedly, we will come upon an opening, as in discovering the secret door and the space beyond it, so we can look around and know what we’ve known but come to see and truly know it as if truly for the first time.
LikeLike
Have you ever seen a movie called “Stardust”? It’s a movie I think that you might love(and coincidentally a lot of it was filmed in my nearby city of Norwich in the oldest part of the city)
In the film the premise is that England is divided from the Otherworld of Faerie by a wall that runs the entire length of England. The wall is not one that is generally breached or even noticed, but there is a village called Wall where there is the only gap where it is sometimes possible to pass from England into the magical kingdom of Stormhold. The gap is guarded night and day. Once in a while someone goes over the wall in search of adventure and rarely ever comes back. The story(based on an equally fabulous novel by Neil Gaiman) is that of a young man who seeks to retrieve a fallen star to win over his love, but the star falls on the other side of the wall and on that other side, a star is not a lump of rock at all….
I shall go and ponder on this, and on the line from Eliot you allude to at the end of your comment. The Four Quartets are my travel guide.
LikeLike
I know this movie and I love it. It speaks to what we are discussing. The presumption is that these are two worlds that cannot be married. How it ends is provocative.
LikeLike
Ah well, then you will know what I mean when I say I would give a fortune for a Babylon candle!
It’s a movie I watch regularly; I’ve even used it with my language students because the themes it deals with are ones the kids enjoy(I say kids but they’re between 12 and 20)
The faerie story; fund for immense resources…Women who run with the Wolves etc.
LikeLike
I think the world of dreams serves as our babylon candle. Knowing how to focus it — ah, now there’s the thing!
LikeLike
Hello. I stumbled upon this Dreams/Corridors thread whilst searching for info about Unworthiness. I have a recurring dream about corridors, rooms, stairs, doors. Whereas the dreams of viv66 seem to focus toward the claustrophobic and trapped, mine does not. My dream seems to be best described as hasty searching, lost, panicky or anxious, futile, sometimes lucid and usually quite lengthy. I am wondering if I am able to discuss this through this forum? Normally, I wouldn’t write something like this, but I find some truths in what you & viv66 say that seem relevant to me. I would like the opportunity to discuss my variation on the dream. Hoping you are still there and that this is an appropriate request. Regards, Myles
LikeLike
Myles,
I have been away from blogging for some time and just now am returning. if your question is still relevant, I’d be happy to carry on a dialogue with you about the dream sequence you referenced.
LikeLike
Hi. i also have a similar recurring dream to Myles – often open wide corridors where I am searching for my own room and enter different peoples rooms. The dreams have a searching panicky feeling of being lost and not being able to find my own place. I also feel shut out or left out in the dreams. The places are often schools, or student accomodation type buildings where everyone has their own allotted room. i’d be grateful if you could comment on this, found your discussion above very interesting
LikeLike