a Dream is a Dream is a Dream

I write inspired by the madness of the Friday eve, its petty decadence of aimless men and women, sleepwalkers on cement lubricated by brew, spit and sticky sweat. Do they know they are dreaming? You never know until you wake up...

I dreamed some nights ere of a young woman who answered by the name Ferre, yet whose true name is lost in the dream, known only to Morpheus. She found herself standing in the midst of a spacious chamber, of tall pastel coloured walls broken only by a staircase, steep as only Dutch mountains can be, winding its way round the room. At its highest point stood something that can only be described as a Lovecraftian abomination, of barely defined shape, texture and colour. Yet impression cannot resist description, and my memory of it is of an entity a little like a starfish moving as a mockery of man; bearing the rocky, brittle texture and colour of charcoal, its darkness broken only by the edges of it shape, so sharp that they nearly glowed. As it started descending the stairs, slowly, Ferre woke up from her dream, shaking and sweating.

She found herself within the very same chamber, now darker in tonality, a tranquil, dark olive. Beside her stood her friend, whose name is, perhaps, Galla. She soothed the trembling Ferre, as she thought of the time before the nightmares, before the pills. Were the capsules the cause or merely the catalyst of dread? She looked at the container standing on the squat night table, her hand grasping what her eyes could but touch. Holding the flask by her heart, to the bewilderment of Ferre, she unscrewed the cap and dropped one copper coloured capsule, a miniature metallic egg. Confusion gave way to terror when Ferre saw Galla take one pill and place it into her mouth. They gulped in unison.

Sleep pulled at her eyelids, dragging them down, but Galla would not concede before a curtain call to her pupils. Her eyes endured the constant assault of sand, searing but unyielding. And since Galla would not go to the Dreamworld, It would come to her. Between the grains stuck to her lashes she saw a familiar shape still on the spiralling stairs. Before it even quivered, she had dashed to meet it, her feet swallowing the stairs in pairs and triads until they stood beside it, their hunger quenched. Then sluggishly, painfully even, their languid legs moved in unison up the last handful of steps to a tall door. Galla tentatively taped the door ajar and stood aside, letting the leviathan lump its way within while she motioned Ferre to scale the steps and follow her fear into the room.

Ferre closed her eyes briefly to gather courage and found herself before the frame. As soon as she had stepped through it, she found herself back in the same room, dizzy with the knowledge that her dread had departed forever. Another memory surfaced soon after, a shadow of a dying girl, leaving His side. But who was He?..

Too late. I awoke confused, nagged by a prophetic feeling. I stood and went in search of Father, he would know. I found him in the dressing room and recounted him my dream and collected my thoughts.

"The strange thing is..." I added, only to be interrupted by his brisk departure. The thought was broken by the bang of the door.

Distracted, my attention fell on a set of emerald garnments hanging from a rack. A mess jacket reminiscent of a Matador's. A suit, tainted by a dark stain under the left clavicle. Some trousers...

...and Father returns and looks into my eyes, concerned. Bloodied and tired despite the rest...

...I wake yet again, woken by Galla's kiss, a deep flow of liquid tenderness, but it's not enough. I look at Ferre and ask her. Her fleshy lips don't even quiver, her short hair a helmet isolating her, keeping her warm in her coldness. As I wake again, some machine measures the coordinates of my thought: "Where are you Ferre?"

Broken glass

Years ere, I had a Nightmare, a most unpleasant affair. Indeed, a nightmare with capital letter, for the usual nightmare is rather interesting. The latter turns the misty matter of dream more solid, more living, and sharper than sentient existence. But Nightmare is something else, it is the sweat soaking your face in the morning, the tremor of tendons as fingers sweep sand out of dilated eyes. Nightmare is a dream too frighteningly real, one that threatens to overthrow stable reality to let reign the pandemonium of reverie. Fear comes from feeling that your existence is perhaps confined to the realm of the looking glass, and the smirking face behind the mirror gloats over your stolen freedom...

That morning I had been thus caged in Nightmare, not by iron bars, but by the vast, barren landscape that stretched before me and across infinity as a tired god on a cloudy bed. The whiteness of the endless plane bred madness in my mind as my eyes turned drunk with bare absence. I floated, shapeless and incorporeal, an eyeless observer to the scenes that would unfold in that timeless limbo. Both my being and senses were ensnared, unable to deviate but for one instant, locked into place by dread and anticipation.

Suddenly, an image manifested, as though it had always been there: a young woman, bare and beautiful, sprinted towards the glass screen separating her and me. She leaped through the wall and, as though Time blinked during the impact, appeared on the other side. She crouched on the floor unharmed, almost foetal in her mien, her head bowed not low enough to masquerade the fairness of her face. But then another blink, this time in the eyes of Chance, and where she had been, a bloody pool extended on the plane. Horror shook my sleeping body as I felt, more than saw, her body entire torn by the sharp shards of crystal. Both images stood waiting, languishing in my eyes as consciousness attempted vainly to refuse them passage. Both seen at once, yet separate, as though Fate held its trumps in hand, a sadistic player who out of spite refuses to play a card. Death and life clasped in one cruel fist...

the King, the Fishbowl and the Gypsy

This brief bedtime tale is inspired in a dream I had this somewhat lazy morn, and on some contemplations I had the night before:

"Once upon a time, on a small island in the Mediterranean sea, lived a sad King, whose sorrow stemmed from the loss of his dear Wife, who in her wake, in her endless sleep left but a thick, bronze lock of hair, a bookmark in his crimson notebook, once the place where all his passions were kept. Each night the king burned one hair from the curl as an act of remembrance and mourning, but as years passed, the curl never thinned within his book nor did the King dare to ever write within it again.

One dreamless eve, desperate to rid himself from the tangles of dolorous memory, he tore the dense whorl and cast it out of his heart and into the hearth. But when the hair did not catch flare, remaining stolid in the thick blaze, the king resolved to fuel the flame with that which burnt most brightly within him, that which tormented him each moment of his now solitary life. He took his volume, empty of visible writing, yet thickly scribbled with the ink of his Love, in all its shapes and sizes, with each thought dedicated to his beloved Queen impressed there by his bare breath and subtle touch. Grasping it in his right hand, he prayed to free himself of grief, to find happiness again even if it cost his Heart. With that, he threw the volume into the fire.

What occurred later that night is but dead reckoning, but in the dawn the court saw an eerie Fishbowl standing upon a slim, hourglass shaped table by the throne. Within, turned and swirled a shoal of green finned parr and one Goldfish in water that oft reminded one of quicksilver, appearing at the same time thick and murky, yet also bright and of easy flow. No plants nor rocks adorned the Aquarium, not even muck nor rests of food were to be seen, since the King had ordered them not to be fed. Day in, day out the King observed the fish, and when, out of hunger, the Goldfish gulped one of the fishes, he would promptly and merrily declare war upon one of his many neighbors and mobilize his armies to seize their domains.

As the kingdom expanded so did the Fishbowl begin to run out of fish, until one day the very last parr was devoured by the greedy Goldfish. That eve, the King hosted a great feast, serving his noblemen and officers his best wine from his clearest crystal glasses, and bade them shatter them on the floor, but throw as they might, no glass broke nor scratched. Taking this as a good omen, the King took a small band of his closest knights and marched upon his last remaining rival, a Gypsy maiden residing in a low keep. The Gypsy offered no resistance and, to welcome her visitors, removed from their hinges the gates of her hold, much adorned with flamboyant designs depicting the forests, mountains and sea around her modest patch of land. But the jealous King was covetous, and said: "This is my domain, not yours to picture and delight in." And with that he ordered to chop and char them.

Mute, the Gypsy motioned her guests to enter her abode, whose walls were filled with Romany art and the air riddled with music, offering them her best delicatessen and drink, but the cruel King would take none and ordered his knights to tear the silken cloths, smash the painted vases and rip the guitars' strings. The Gypsy fell to her knees and wept, cupping her hands up to the King and with her moist eyes asking "What then? What will you take?" The King, satisfied, smiled and took in his hand her long black mane and with a swift cut severed it off her head. Thus he turned and left her, bearing away the sign of his last conquest.

That night, the happy King looked into his Fishbowl and watched his Goldfish twirling within, chasing its own, now nibbled tail, until all at once it caught its tail fin and bit further and further until it finally swallowed itself whole. As the liquid stopped moving and cleared in the vacant Aquarium, the King came to himself and remarked that in his hand he still held the Gypsy's mane. As he turned to glance at it, he discovered it was not black, but bronze."

Colossus

Tonight I dreamt I was a girl, sired by two grand forces of Nature yet orphaned by the two. What caused the death of these two parents I know not, but surely nothing is eternal. Therefore, I set out to wake Father from his deep slumber.

I conjured him on a wide, empty street, ashen like Pompeii. He was a concoction of life, ghost and past: feeble and mistrustful, his beard occluding his true thoughts when he did speak, a rather sporadic eventuality. Yet I guided him - half convincing, half dragging - to the Hospital where we would carry out our... my purpose. To guide Father through the entrance proved much more demanding than I first reckoned, we only crossed the threshold after I persuaded him that I had brought him here to be restored to his full life. The deserted reception room was wholly formed of moving walls, shaping and reshaping itself, slowly guiding us onward as it diagnosed Father's ailment and readied itself to transmute his weakness into strength.

I remember, quite distinctly, the pictured design that would transform the elder sinews of his brain into a young, spirited hive of thought. But I could have never been prepared for the metamorphosis that would ensue. His force was taken from its withered, fleshy scallop and poured into a golden egg, a round Colossus of heavy, elongated eyes; of ample, frog-like jaw; whose stumpy legs and arms gave him a deceptively endearing aspect, much akin to Humpty-Dumpty. Yet the movement within his heart, an orange sun he literally wore upon his sleeves, suggested it could not be felled nor raised by horses or men.

Thus, Father and I went on along the shifting corridors and stairs of the live building, gaining height as we searched out the fourth floor. The higher we went, the quieter the corridors became, and wilder and broader our urban landscape became, increasingly evidencing that it was built not for the likes of me, but for my Father's kin. It was upon the third floor, I believe, that we chanced upon some respite from the pervasive stillness, as we encountered a nursing mechanism, a marble coloured, smaller and milder replica of my Colossus. Before I knew it, Father turned and deftly pounded upon the dwarf with his paws, cracking his frame like an eggshell.

"Do you think you can do anything?" I shouted in fury at Father.

His deep eyes twisted towards me and his voice, bottomless as mine was high, replied: "Yes."

"Then learn love," I said, now calmly.

The light within his bare heart swirled upon his hands, and now emerged from every opening of his armour, his eyes the searchlights of a lighthouse, roaming the meaning in my request. Suddenly all quietened down, he stood the same and I could not tell if I had dreamed his sudden enlightenment. Time would tell, I told myself.

Soon we found ourselves before the stairs to the fourth floor. As we scaled them, the ambient changed from the gelid precision of the hospital to the warm inhospitality of a great mansion. The now-wooden stairs faced a dining room that, judging from its crude aspect, must have belonged to the servants. Upon the stark oaken table sat two bowls of olive-coloured soup. We could not help but enter, unaware of the unseeable presence of legion spirits in the room, their ruddy auras balancing the green colour of the death realm we had entered. As we consumed the soup, perishing with each spoonful, behind us a window opened within the door-frame revealing to all present but Father and me, the satisfied eyes of Mother.