Is the ‘finish’ of the dream when we wake up, or—was the end of the dream actually the beginning? Was the sound of the alarm clock (now programmed into our phone calendars) an auditory sensation that generated the sequence of events? Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, physicist, inventor and art historian, put forth the idea that time moves backwards while we are dreaming. By analogy, does time move backwards while we are drawing architecture?

The stories we tell when we are asleep move in a reverse direction. For Florensky, this is also a reversal of space. The flipping of both time and space is significant to understanding architecture’s ‘finish’. As an orthodox priest, Florensky was ardent about the spiritual dimension of seeing the flip side of perspective through icons. An icon’s power was enacted by the contemplative mode of the viewer’s gaze. Equally significant was the placement of the point of view behind the painted board. When we gaze at an icon, we are aware of the idea that God is looking at us, rather than the other way around.1

Florensky maintained that the aim of a dream is understanding, or ‘waking’, which comes about when we think backwards.

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1 Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, Translated by Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 38-9. After the revolution, Father Florensky was imprisoned in Siberia. It is only relatively recently that this writing has been translated into English. In Iconostasis, he uses his own dream as an example of the reversal of time. It ‘ends’ with a pealing of bells that coincide with his alarm: “Then the bell begins to sway and suddenly it peals out in loud, piercing sounds—so piercing, in fact, that I awake to find that the piercing sound is my alarm clock ringing.” He realizes that the alarm was the impetus for the dream sequence.