The Windowless Room

Just spent three days in a windowless room. No, I wasn’t in a holding cell. Or in anything like a sensory deprivation tank either. I was staying at a trendy Stockholm hotel. All their other rooms were booked. And even their ones without windows weren’t cheap. But since I’m usually up for trying most things at least once, I figured, why not? And I’m glad I did.
When you’re a single traveler going from city to city, from downtown to downtown, you seldom get the best hotel rooms in any case. Especially when you don’t want to pay extra for the proverbial “room with a view.” Instead, you usually end up in a room with a crap view — often just of the modern building across the street or alley from you. And if you spend all your day out and about like I do, then you’re never in your hotel room often enough to “enjoy the view” in any case. So, you might as well be in a windowless room.
And if you travel up north as I like to do — getting as close to the Land of the Midnight Sun and the Aurora Borealis as you can, then a windowless room has certain advantages. No matter how good a hotel’s blackout curtains tend to be, the light will still bother you on those days when there’s 20 or more hours of daylight. And if you’re traveling in winter when there can be over 20 hours of darkness, then a window is not something you’re likely to miss. OK, so it can be a bit disorienting in spring or fall when your internal clock can’t automatically connect with the light levels outside. But I think your body would eventually rewire itself and adjust.
The other plus of being in a windowless room is that it’s effectively soundless. No street noise. No elevator noise. Not even much noise from the hallway either. It’s almost like being in a soundproof room at a recording studio. And as long as you keep the TV’s glass window on the outside world turned off (what is there really worth watching in any case?), then all you can hear are your own thoughts.
And that’s just when it starts to get interesting. Without any distractions, without any outside stimulation, your mind is on its own. You can dive into the pages of a good book — I traveled far south to a future Antarctica in Paul McAuley’s fascinating new novel Austral — and just disappear without worrying that you’ll be disturbed.
You can let your thoughts run wild and then follow them as they jump from one point to the next. My thoughts took me from my room number 617 — to recollections of an early job as a motorcycle courier with the same numeric ID — to my old half-written dystopian SF novel about crossing the United States on a motorcycle — to figuring out what to do next.
You can call up and relive your memories. I reviewed my past Nordic trips to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland, remembering where I had already been and what I had already done. Then I noticed the gaps and realized I’d forgotten that I still want to make it to the Faroe Islands. And to Greenland. Maybe one day ….
All in all, I must admit that I enjoyed my time in that windowless room. And I might just give it another try some day. You might want to think about it as well. You will find that your mind adjusts. And then your imagination starts building windows of its own.