Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Phobia

Not a very -what's the word, transcendent dream. One with bugs. Maybe it came about because of the item in the news about the UN telling people to eat bugs, maybe it is just a way of channeling stress that can't find other ways to resolve. In my dream I was in my room, which I think was downstairs in the house in Catia, and was clearing some shelves that were full of old stuff, yellow moth-eaten books, bits of indecipherable paper and, in the bottom shelf, behind a pile of other stuff, piles and piles of sweets; blue and red and orange balls of sugar that must have lain there for years and years. And, in attendance, cockroaches which, their environment disturbed, were coming out in droves, as well as bits of dead insect everywhere. Now, if you know me you will realise that even writing the previous paragraph was difficult: I have an overwhelming life long phobia of those bugs, cannot even bring myself to think about them anyway. I tried to clean the shelf with a little dust pan and brush (that I was planning to throw away after, of course), but there was always more. And then I realised it was very late and I needed to sleep but how could I sleep in a room full of those things. So I covered the entire room with thick white blankets and just lied on that bed -but sleep was going to be impossible and I was shivering in cold and revulsion as I woke up (for real) in my North London room, blissfully un-infested...

Thursday, May 09, 2013

I'm walking next to the slow moving current… what is it. It's not a river, what flows in it is a dense, viscose substance that swirls as it goes, making a low humming, scratching noise. It goes all the way down the highland valley and falls down, unseen from here, off the cliff at the end in the distance. A little bit like a glacier -but glaciers are not red and mauve and purple and don't swirl as they go. I have no idea what would happen if I fell in that stream but I have no wish to find out, so I walk down a few hundred meters to the bridge ahead, the flimsy rickety bridge that should take me to the other side, where the mists begin and where up far away I am awaited. Over the hum of the stream and the distant muffled roar of the cascade, I can hear the sound of a horn in the distance. The pitch of the long, long note goes up and then drops at the end, then they play again, each note at least half a minute. It is a summons. I'm near the bridge now; as I step on it, it wobbles from side to side and I very carefully walk, stopping every few steps when it feels too unsteady. On the other side of the bridge, the grass appears and disappears in the mist, the slow ascent will begin. The horn sounds again. Then I notice the star; in the middle of the misty day, I can still make out a red dot in the sky, like an ominous eye surveying over the world. As I leave the bridge behind, I hear it crack, bits of it fall in the stream. I will have been the last one to cross here, I think, as I walk into the mist, up the low gradient towards the mountains at the end of the valley. The horn sounds again, its echo lingering. Today the world will change.