The dream place, as it turns out, is a hallucinatory nightmare, but one of such beauty that it's no wonder that so many are drawn to its devouring flame.
The imposter John of Leyden, who wore a false but very stylish crown in Giacomo Meyerbeer's "Le Prophete," was devoured by flames in a fire that he set himself.
Once past the velvet rope, they ascend an escalator, walk past the Hudson Hotel's low-slung front desk and enter a noisy, brick-walled dining room with a thudding party-mix soundtrack, communal tables and a large open kitchen in the middle of the room bordered overhead by a frieze depicting human figures being devoured by flames.
He attempted unsuccessfully to put out the flames devouring the teenager before ringing emergency services but doctors were unable to save Ms Urusu, who suffered 50 per cent burns to her body.
The flames devouring sections of this sprawling southern California metropolis were started by arsonists and fuelled by righteous anger over the not guilty verdict in the Rodney King police brutality case.
Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone..
The flames apparently devouring the cathedral – whose dome designed by Sir Christopher Wren rose above the scorched city after the Great Fire destroyed the medieval original – are projections by the artist Martin Firrell, and will be seen each night from Thursday to Sunday.
Great beauty and tenderness accompany an account of fire devouring a house, from the first little flame "stretching its neck for sustenance like a little orange chick," to its joyous triumph, "as swelling and as rolling as the sea".
It is wholly – in fact, quite prettily – surrounded by lusciously colourful licks of red and yellow flame, eagerly devouring this creature, whose skin seems to be melting from its body, almost effortlessly.
But it was the self-immolation of a monk in Saigon in June 1963 - rather, pictures of him serenely meditating as flames devoured his body - that first troubled America's conscience about what was then an obscure war.
