2479 N Sheridan / Doll Hospital

Click for map: 2479 N Sheridan / lat 39.75285861908484 lon -105.05283813471654

Call 720-845-5413 extension 25 to hear this dream.

You are running a marathon, wearing running shoes & running shorts, a terrycloth sweatband around your head. As you run & run, you keep returning back to & passing by the front of the Doll Hospital. You pass the building again & again. You try to identify the moment when running away from the Doll Hospital switches into running toward the Doll Hospital, but each time you miss the transitional moment, & there’s that doll again, its doll-eyes again watching you pass with disregard. You want to go into the Doll Hospital & see why this is happening, but if you stray off the marathon route you will be disqualified, so you keep running & running past the Doll Hospital. And then finally, after passing the Doll Hospital for what must be the one-hundredth time, it is too much. You stop & lean your hands on your knees to catch your breath. You walk up & open the door & step inside. Inside the Doll Hospital everything is simultaneously immobilized & moving in every direction at once. Time here has been dislocated from the progressing movement of time. Time functions not as moments but as potential events, past & future, that all sit situated into space. A huge grandfather clock sits against a wall. The grandfather clock is holding time hostage. You pick a rock up off the floor, but as you do, you must lift it one thousand times in one thousand different ways, the second of lifting the rock replaying in a loop of variations until your arm is almost entirely exhausted. With the last of your strength, you throw the rock at the clock. As the rock moves through the air, it cycles through every possible variation of its motion, falling flat, hitting the ceiling, bursting into tiny shards, But finally, one variation of the throw allows the rock to hit the grandfather clock. The clock face shatters open. All the hours & minutes & seconds that the clock had held trapped within it spill out into the world all at once, flooding the building with all of time.