Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Kaleidoscopes

I think it was Daniella's house and I was waiting in the upper reception bit for her to turn up for her lesson, but she was, I was told, otherwise engaged somewhere else in the house. The light was not very good and things had a sort of veiled and mysterious hue to them. I wondered whether they would be in the lower reception -you could see a bit of it through down the steps. The candelabra (which I had never noticed before) were all lit and there was something grand but slightly odd about the room, as if the devil were going to hold his great dinner feast there that night and this were the moment just before the guests started to arrive. There were no guests as yet, though. I was aware, somehow, that I was seeing a scene from the past and maybe not even from a 'real' past, not one that was real for me. How did I get here? Had I driven? Had I taken the por-puesto that left you at the corner of 3a Transversal? I couldn't remember. There were hushed voices coming from somewhere upstairs. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here. There must be some kind of way out of here..

You wake up thinking of death, have to get up to have a drink of water and a wee, stagger to the bathroom in the semi-darkness thinking of the fragility and transience of human life. Then remember the house, the upper reception room, the feeling that there was a party of some sort just about to begin and that you didn't want to be part of it, whatever it was. You stagger back to bed, various led lights blinking in the room. Maybe four hours' sleep, if I manage to fall asleep soon. What is that? A market stall. Hey, it's good to see you. She hasn't seen me, though, or does not recognise me..

So many dreams go forgotten, most of them as soon as we wake up. What are they? I suppose there are many answers and many possible readings to this, just as is the case with almost any human activity. Dreams are part of the web of our lives. You can say they are not real, they are only what our brains, largely below the surface of consciousness, make of what we experience of the world and of ourselves, rather than the reality of that world -but then every thing we experience of the world does go through that sieve of perception and of what we are made of, with all the biases resulting from that and which we cannot escape.