Opening Day at The Dream Hotel

Laaaayydeeeezz an’ gen – tul - MEN!! Good evening!! It brings me great pleasure, excitement, terror and shivering wonderment to introduce you all to the Dream Hotel! I hope you feel the same as I do. This is a very special night! No photographs please! Turn off your phones! We are opening not just a hotel, not just rooms of repose and opulence, but a gathering of chambers! These chambers are cells. Don’t look so worried, they’re not prison cells! Though they can be if you so wish. These are cells of the mind, organically grown! People’s last wishes, childhood desires, wildest fantasies, even portals to the darkest of shadowed thoughts, the scorched earth inside the heads of the damned! You all appear somewhat confused. Physically fit and mentally alert creatures like your good selves should not be deprived of crucial information! Allow me to explain, for you all have paid a king’s ransom to be here tonight!

We have a total of twenty two rooms in the hotel. We have a very large bar, oak panelled and designed in the classic New York style, and the room is walled with finely polished mirrors. We have twenty two beer taps, and a bottle display running fifty feet from floor to ceiling. It runs the length of the barroom, approximately thirty feet or so. It might look like it stretches into infinity at times. You might think it’s a trick of the light. It is not.

We have installed the best jukebox in all creation. It can play any song, any musical composition, no matter how obscure. All you have to do is ask it. You want “Love Me” by The Phantom? Got it. You want Miles Davis playing Tokyo in 1972? All right. You want the songs the Million Dollar Quartet were singing in Sun Studios before the tape started recording? Right there. We have every drink you could want. From Odell’s Pale Ale, to 18th Century Cognac to wine pressed with the blood of Charlemagne, we have it all. The bar has been open for trading for a month now, and it’s doing rather well. Also, for the moment, please stay away from the mirrors. We’re still ironing out a few kinks.



I’ve also decided folks, to be a bit perverse and not list all our rooms. Some of them stay fixed in what they do. Some do not. Many change locations from time to time. A room visited may not contain the same thing tomorrow. As the owner and proprietor I’ll try to tell you as much as I can, but I’m tempted along with Management to let you check rooms without telling you what they contain. We tend to find this amusing and in keeping with the delightful chaotic spirit of our enterprise. We feel it will keep you on your toes. Do you follow? Good. I can’t help but notice your gathering sweat and excitement. I know that you’re all dying to hear about the rooms. Well, wait no longer, ladieezungennelmen!



On our first level is the Dinosaur Room. This immersive room will plunge its guests into the environment of Cretacous North America, circa 66 million B.C. We were smart enough to date it well before the asteroid. It is a fascinating exciting world, full of thrills and danger. The weather is lovely, and the air is head singingly clean. It needs to be as you may have to run a bit. Don’t worry about the skeletons. Just stay on the designated trails, and if you see the Rex, head for the nearest shelter. He can move quite fast when he wants, and it seems he has acquired the taste for people.

Next door, we have our Beach Room. Not just any beach or room, this contains a lovely straw roof and driftwood beach house with two levels, and sun loungers on the sand, on the coast of the Sea of Tethys. The sea itself is beautiful. Cobalt blue, still as mercury. The sand is so clean it verges on white. The weather is tropical, with high humidity, and going for a swim is like slipping into a perfectly warmed bath. Stay in the shallows and watch out for the Mosasaurs. They go for swimmers, and they’re too big to be stopped with firearms, which is all we can legally supply at the moment. Also, we have an intermittent problem with Allosaurs prowling the beach for carrion. If you see them, stay in the beach house.

Two doors down, we have the William Shatner Room. Here you will find yourself in a small amphitheatre of milky blackness. Onstage will be the great actor and singer William Shatner who will sing you the Great American Songbook in his own inimitable style. He will sing for as long as you want and will also take requests. We ask you as guests to not listen to anything he says to you. There might be some nonsense about wanting to leave, ravings about being made to perform without sleep for up to 96 hours. This is all part of the act. We are not keeping Mr. Shatner here against his will. He is being remunerated even as I speak, and he does get fed and watered.

Two doors down from Mr. Shatner, we have the Ed Gein room, for those of you of a dark disposition. This is one of our rooms that you might find a cell in a more literal sense. Upon entering the room, the guests are plunged into the head of the Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin. You will see through his eyes. You will bear mute witness to his crimes and deeds. You will watch him slit the throat of Mary Hogan and bludgeon Bernice Worden. You will feel the dead skin on his naked body as he dances in frosted winter moonlight. You will watch him make household implements and ornaments of the parts of the long dead and the bleached bones of the recently living. This might be a tad intense for some of you. Guests who select this room will be asked to leave the hotel the following day.

As a polar opposite we have the Summer Room open next door. We feel this could be a popular room. We’ve taken a piece of Summer, a full field from Wicklow, Ireland. It is bursting with flowers. Daisies, poppies, buttercups. It is full of long meadow grass ready for harvest. It is humming with bees, butterflies and the hiss of grasshoppers. Swallows trill on a breeze like a child’s breath. It is neatly surrounded by oak and sycamore trees. The horizon shimmers warmly under a clear blue sky with not a single tuft of cloud. There is a little red tractor, a Massey Ferguson I think, ploughing ground in the hazy distance. If I told you how we got it all in there you wouldn’t believe me.

Directly above on the second floor, we have the room that we’ve named the Nixon Oval Office Booze Up. It’s a party room. We advise that you bring water. This room brings you into the inner sanctum of the White House, January 1972. Here you will be confronted by a drunk, pantsless Richard Nixon. But worry not! He just wants drinking buddies and an ear to pour his troubles into. If you’re lucky he’ll play the ol’ Joanna for you. Play you some old music hall numbers or even a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis, whom he secretly likes. Just don’t let him talk to the paintings. He gets maudlin and he says truly awful things. Keep him at the desk chugging gin. Try to match him drink for drink. Don’t mention politics. Talk about pro football and baseball, he’ll talk your ear off and he’s quite the authority.

You will find, laydeezundgennelmen, that there is little intervention in these rooms. However, we have been diligent and forensic in our attention about this issue. At the end of the hall containing the Nixon Oval Office Booze Up, we have the Author Suicide Room. Here, guests will have the chance to converse with great writers who, unfortunately, killed themselves. We ask you to talk to them. Talk to Sylvia Plath. Tell her that her poetry was written in strands of blood and that Ted Hughes is a prick. Talk to Ernest. Tell him not to drink so much. Tell him his early work changed writing, that there’s no need to labour under the incandescent light of his beginning. Tell him to drink the orange juice and put the shotgun away. Talk to Richard Brautigan. Again, tell him to stop drinking, to hang on in there, that he has friends who care for him. Tell him his career will turn around. Talk to Cesare Pavese. Tell him that there will be other women besides Constance Dowling. Tell him his poems tower like collonades of marble in ancient Rome. These are just four, but there are many more. We ask you to not change the course of History but try to keep some light in the world. Alright?

And, next door to that we have the Jim Kerr Room. Some of you here may not be familiar with Simple Minds or their work. We feel you will enjoy this. Upon entering the room, guests will be plunged into Jim Kerr’s body while he is miming to their hit song ‘Alive and Kicking’, the video of which was filmed in the Catskill Mountains in New York in 1985. He is dancing on the side of a cliff. The song is joyous, and you will feel every gesture and emotion in Mr. Kerr as he performs. By the time it gets to the refrain at the end, your body will be suffused with a feeling akin to gold. You’ll leave with a bounce in your step, make no mistake. You also have the option, if desired, of selecting their performance of ‘Waterfront’, or ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ if you’re feeling wistful.

Keeping with the musical theme, on the top of the hotel we have the Riot On Sunset Strip room. Guests will be transported back to Los Angeles, 1966. Here you will have a profusion of bright, day glo clubs where you will be able to dance with pretty hippy girls and watch performances of The Seeds, Love, The Doors, The Mothers Of Invention, The Standells, Tim Buckley, The Chocolate Watchband, The Electric Prunes and The Strawberry Alarm Clock. If you’re lucky you might also get a night where the Stones pop in or Jefferson Airplane come down from San Francisco. Stay away from Brian Jones if you see him. There’s something very wrong with him. Also, don’t try the acid tabs that are coloured lime green. We’ve done our research so you don’t have to.

Lastly we have the Genesis Room, a small ante room leading onto the second floor balcony. It has nothing to do with Phil Collins. It is the beginning of a galaxy, a small swirling cloud with intermittent flashes. We believe it has a certain level of cognitive intelligence. Speak kindly and it starts to grow. You will see the development of new planetary systems, the flaring of new stars. We believe that this will create a whole new area for our business to explore as there will be whole new worlds created, things never seen, ripe for exploration. Not exploitation! We’re not that kind of hotel. We prefer to generate revenue indirectly. The Dream Hotel is an altruistic business, and if business grows we intend to keep it that way.

Well, I’m just about out of time here folks. I hope as the owner of the Dream Hotel that you’re all as excited as I am. If you have any questions, contact the Manager, Hermann. His answers may not be the ones you seek but they’ll be answers nonetheless. I look forward to seeing you all over the coming years.