Dream a little dream…of the city • EdwardMcAllan

“There’s a dog buried near here,” Tom Ogden says. “It’s in a crystal coffin.” He grins at me and consults his high-tech smartphone. In his bandana and dark clothes, he looks like a pirate hunting for treasure, although his belt holds gadgetry instead of a cutlass. “We must be pretty close now.”
We’re in Piershill Cemetery. Tom has just shown me a city tour with a difference. Although it’s taken in some well-known landmarks – the Heart of Midlothian, for example, the spittle-strewn site of the city’s former jail on the Royal Mile – it’s also had some unusual reference points. These range from mysterious “Back S.H.I.E.L.D.” graffiti in the closes of the Old Town to the discovery that the Golden Ratio was used to design the streets of the New Town. Tom has a brain full of obscure facts about Edinburgh: he seems to be on first-name terms with every cobblestone, nook and alley.
“I’m going to photograph the headstone,” he says. “The dog was called Beauty, and belonged to The Great Lafayette, a magician who got it from Houdini. Three days after the dog died, Lafayette died in a fire.” His eyes are full of enthusiasm. “All these little stories make the places we live much richer if we know them. Suddenly, you’re not walking down mundane, dull, everyday streets anymore, but fabulous avenues full of wonderful ideas and incredible stories. There are dreams beneath our feet.”
Tom Ogden is an entrepreneur. He graduated with a degree in computer science, but has been employed as a barman, a tour guide at the Lasswade Butterfly and Insect World, a street magician and even, so he claims, a pirate in the South Seas. Now he’s launching a website – wedreamthecity.com – that aims to let its users share their dreams, creations and discoveries about the cities they live in.
“I want to get people to see their cities in different ways,” he says. “I want artists and poets and ordinary people to use the site to share their dreams with the rest of us. People can post whatever they want, within reason – poetry, prose, artwork, photos of places in Edinburgh that have meaning. Or that give them a strange feeling, you know, like deja vu?”
So where did the idea come from?
“I dream about the city a lot. Often, the streets look different: for example, I see Newington in my dreams sometimes, only developed as far as West Newington Place, with fields stretching away to the south. Or I might be in a haunted flat in a part of town I’ve never been to before. I thought it could be cool if others could see what I see when I walk around. WeDreamTheCity tries to do that. I’m starting with Edinburgh, but eventually we could do London. And I’ve got friends in Budapest who are interested.”
At the moment, Tom runs wedreamthecity.com by himself. “I have an angel,” he explains. “The funding allows me to do it fulltime.” When I ask about things like moderating the content that gets posted, Tom says that he hopes that eventually the site will run itself. “I’ve got a reward system in place, you get more privileges the more stuff you add.” He smiles knowingly. “There are some special treats in store for the really active dreamers.”
As we talk, Tom explains that he has great plans for the future. “I intend to release some MP3 tours of the city through the site. And I’ve been talking to some volunteers about a Fringe show, a sort of mobile art exhibition where the city itself is a gallery.”Is the site open to everybody?
“We’re doing beta invitations only at the moment,” Tom says. “E-mail me at tom@wedreamthecity.com and sign up – we’ll have a big launch in a couple of months!”
I say goodbye to Tom Ogden at the gates of the cemetery, and he stalks off, looking around, as if he’s trying to record every single aspect of the cityscape on some kind of mental camera obscura. His last words to me have a strange ring to them: “Do we dream the city? Or does the city dream us?” It isn’t your everyday question, but then he isn’t your everyday person.
As I walk home, the sun is setting and the red haze makes Edinburgh look dreamlike. I can’t help but notice odd things – a scrawled poem in chalk on a wall, funny patterns on the manhole covers. For a moment, I feel as if I’m lost in a dream, and can’t help wondering – do I dream the city or does the city dream me? I begin to wonder if Tom is on to something.
Find out for yourself at www.wedreamthecity.com