do you know you're dreaming, flavio?

In my dreams I always go back to the house in Catia but it is never the same -it changes over time, grows rooms and even floors, or stories (it most certainly grows stories), takes on new inhabitants who sometimes reflect my current life but sometimes are just a mystery, an unknown unknown, people perhaps imagined by whatever subsystem of my brain deals with those things, or perhaps seen in passing without taking them in, who knows. Or perhaps glimpsed in another narrative, in another point in the sift space.. In the distance, fires rage on the side of the Avila mountain, lions are loose on the street and everybody cowers and looks from behind net curtains as the beasts fight to the death on the streets, ancient police cars with the sirens on look on from street corners without intervening, one able to just about make out a police officer inside the car nervously talking into an ancient corded microphone3. Our terrace roof, full of rubbish and the detritus of thirty or forty years of neglect and a parrot and a dog, has several levels and connecting passages and steps. We look at the street down there, the lions still on the loose, the policemen still locked in their car not daring to get out and face the menace, the neighbours making gestures or signals which we don't understand and which could be interpreted as a warning of a greater danger than the lions lurking unseen behind us. One of us sings songs with a guitar. Not me, this time. I'm rather concerned about what is happpening. And perhaps why I am here at all; I thought I'de sold this house and moved to London over twenty five years ago. Is Isa my sister in the house, I ask somebody. They point to some place in there, downstairs. The sky is murky and a great shadow seems to be forming behind the house. No, not that dream again, please. I need to wake up reasonably fresh tomorrow. Somebody says to me, what makes me think that this is the dream and not what I think is my waking life. I look up in the sky, a star seems to explode and its light break through the murky clouds. It has begun. Again.

shadows and reflections

Dreams wash away on waking up, I try to hold onto them, ask them questions that they seem to be going to answer but no use, lips move but I can't hear, infers point but I can't see and it is surely only an illusion, a figment, whatever that's, a product of the electric activity of the brain or some such but I am there wide awake in the dark now, with images still forming in my eyes, shreds of dreams washed away, which I choose to give transcendence even though I know better, perhaps choose to see them as a peek into worlds we cannot live in, into all that could be and could yet be but probably won't, real as it may be in the field of the possible, before the function collapses to what is only -or is that what happens.

I have to get up in a minute, but instead I close my eyes and images form of things I think I've never seen but I probably have, of course, and moulded and distorted to produce the reassuring numinous quality of transcendence, our making up a world beyond to make better for this failing one full of conflict in which we ail and fail and die and which seems to belong to the ruthless and the strong, neither of which i am or want to be.

Shapes in vivid colours, then a face of a woman I've never met, then a seething mass of horrid insects that makes me briefly wake up, then float downstream again, and then I am walking towards the building and I know where I'm going, to the large flat on the tenth floor to reach with you have to get the strange sideways lifts, hangs lifts several times because not all of the, go to the sae floors and for some of which some of the floors literally don't exist so I have to be careful or my journey may be in vain. A sliding door but this isn't the elevator proper, just a prior that leads to it, with people waiting who knows what but I have to get to where I'm going so I carry on and pull open that sort of cupboard door and there it is, that is the lift, the first of them which at least goes upwards. I have to remember to get off on the right floor to then take the sideways lift. That's many floors above the one I need so there always is a flush of panic until I find the righting and know I'm on my way. I don't need to wake up just yet.

Long confused dreams in which I'm in a long complicated, fruitless quest to recover something I'd lost that I could never find. A long long train journey going through amazing landscapes and during which strange things happen on the train itself, but on arrival the destination is a wasteland, a deserted place of ruins and dust devils. I wake up alone, trying still to get hold of the dream, but it's gone, as is the fate of most dreams; only a longing and a sense of loss remain and I already know that even those will slowly fade and disappear -and it is no comfort to know that.

iterations

08/11/2011 07:05
Time runs backwards on this Tube platform; the next train will arrive in six minutes, the one after that in two minutes' time. It is way, way too early. There's a weird smell of something organic burning...

Had been waking up all night, constantly falling asleep to a shallow sleep of restless dreams, constantly waking up to a sort of void outside of time and space, a grey interregnum between sleep and the waking world, maybe between worlds.

Who was the other person in my dream? The dream that lasted for hours, seemingly all the way through the night, with rallies and festivals and parties and music making. The two of them were friends of mine of many years, there had been a guitar and perhaps a political connection. And they'd exchanged food and jokes at some gathering in the previous dream. Now one of them was ranting against the other, saying at some point that if ever he came to meet the guy... and I retorted that they had in fact met and got on famously. That made him even angrier... how could I have done that to him. I mumbled something about all of us being human... that didn't appease him. Some young pupils of mine were witnessing this heated discussion in Spanish, one or two of them looking at the other ones wi some bewilderment. Another smiled at me and said in very broken Spanish: "Yo comprende".

I woke up as I realised that the two enemies friends of mine were in fact he same person in the real world... it all drifts back to me as I now stand on a Tube platform, the dot matrix indicators having gone haywire and me punch-drunk with lack of sleep....

House of mirrors

We were coming back from a guitar summer course, which had itself been a long complicated dream but now it was gone. Now we had taken only the first of several legs of the journey and had to stop at R's h house to pick the rest of our things and then catch a bus (or was it a train) to finally get home. We walked in from the rain and the gloom outside. I said to R we only just had time. I remembered that I had some more things there, a bag full of clothes (which I think were all my clothes in the world) plus of course I was carrying a rucksack and my guitar. I was wondering how I would manage to carry all that and started pouring contents of some bags into others, trying to reduce the number of items I would carry to a more reasonable number. Then R said he had to do a couple of things in the house and would come back in a whileI could if I wanted wander around the apartment. I was a bit concerned about missing the train, or was it a bus, but he said there would be another one soon, it didn't matter. And so he disappeared into the bowels of the flat. I waited for a while, taking in the enormous number of things in that room, what looked like objects d'art, sculptures, vases and the like. I decided I needed to go to the loo so I went to the next room, which was even more impressive. Predominantly free green and sort of velvety, with indirect lights, deep green sofas, paintings on the walls, the air of a museum or somewhere where very rich people lived in a house with so many rooms they seldom would visit them all. Maybe round that corner there would be a loo. There wasn't, only another room as impressive as this. An austere looking lady was standing there, looking at me reprovingly. I asked her where the loo would be. She said "ah, the .. visitor's washroom. This way". There were a series of extremely narrow doors along a wall, each talked by various things, like squares of leather hammered onto the strip of wall between doors. It was impossible that any of those was a loo door or any sort of real door, they were too narrow and there were so many of them. And I went dizzy as I couldn't count the doors, or something. I apologised to the lady but she'd gone. Ah, that is the door -that is a loo. But the room is way too narrow, I do not fit in there. And I do need to go to the loo. There, at the end. There is a loo there but it si open with a sort of division that doesn't separate it from the room and anyone could see you. I tried to close the plastic screen but to no avail, it wouldn't impede anyone from seeing me. And the toilet bowl was full and unflushed. Disgusting, I thought, and in such grand surroundings. No, I would look for a better one. So I looked around and left the room but by then the layout of the flat was so complex I was beginning to get lost. By chance I got back to the first room. Or was it the second. Ok, try again. And R is getting late, too. Maybe if I go this way, that smaller door might be a … no, it isn't,, instead it is a bedroom. What about around this corner. mHere there was a sort of music room and there were people in it. It felt more and more like a museum. There are string instruments and pianos, although on closer look it seemed to me like they either were art pieces rather than real instruments, or electronic instruments. The cellos -there were several of these- didn't have bows or eal strings, the strings were not whole but at the point where the bow would touch the strings there was a round metal plate with a couple of buttons. A couple of people were walking around or sitting looking at the display with a sort of reverence. Then this girl started to sing The Byrds' 'The Weight' and, for some reason, I joined along singing the vocal harmony. Could not remember the words so I was just humming and doing 'la, la' while she sang the words which I sometimes tried to follow too late. I could sing the exact notes of the descant, though, even though I hadn't heard that song for so many years. Then she finished and.. I didn't know what to say to her so I left the room. I started getting a little nervous about R being late and us missing the train. I wandered around the flat, immense and, now I could see, a duplex flat -there were some stairs that led from some upstairs level from which a couple of young people in formal dress were coming down. This corridor led sort of outside. Here there was a storeroom and a kind of auditorium with, again, velvety green seats, about tow hundred of them. And by the side of the house on a lower bank, there was the train line and a train just going past. Well, that 's it then, I'll just miss that train. I went in again but just couldn't find the first room...

vortex

What was it. It made so much sense in the dream. And I could choose to dream of it again, I was saying to myself, “I liked that, I want to dream of that again”. And I did. And it made all sense and it had colours and explained many things about the world and about myself. Oh, I want to dream of it again. And I did, again. And then I woke up and I could remember only vaguely. And you have to get up and brush teeth and shave and have coffee and then think of it again and it’s gone. Not only does it no longer make sense but you cannot remember what it was at all, even less why it explained so much or how it fit in the engine of the universe.

21-09-11

as they drove it away

We were turning round the corner around Plaza Catia when they caught up with us, handgun showing. Pull over. Leave that iPod there, mister. Just leave the car quietly and nobody gets hurt. So we did … as I was getting out of the car the very old Oriental gentleman made a ‘sshh’ sign and I handed him the iPad I was carrying, without the hijackers realising. Shame about my guitar in the boot. And the long long walk home. Where were my companions now? The car was speeding away round the corner of Plaza Catia, without me. I started to walk, down those streets whose names and shapes I had so long forgotten. Up Calle El Cristo towards Calle Bolivar; puddles on the pavement, old cars parked by the kerb, furtive people scuttling by. It was dark, the middle of the night, not the best time to arrive at a house when you had no keys and you didn’t know who would be there. Walk across people who move away from me or give way on the pavement. I thought I probably looked scared, but didn’t think I looked scary. Still, a stranger in the middle of the night in the streets of Catia…

Then it dawned on me. I had nowhere to go. It was well over twenty five years since I’d sold my house in Catia. I would only find strangers there, not refuge. Nowhere to go but to hope that it was a dream and try and force myself to wake up..

Nightfall in Kentish Town

Nightfall in Kentish Town, a photo by flaviomatani on Flickr.

two of them, so much alike

A bit difficult to remember, this one. What was it. There was the long trek to the fancy house where I was due to do a short, half an hour only, lesson for some bratty kid. Hardly worth the while. And looking for a place to park amidst the streets lined with trees, parking spaces difficult to make out as they were raised, part of the pavement and hidden beyond the next clump of trees.

Then I was in the house but it wasn't a lesson any more and my sister was there; she gave me some warning not to go to the door, but it was impossible as we were in an open space, the front door was wide open or absent. She said 'there'll be shooting there across the road', don't put yourself in the cross-fire'. Perhaps she meant they were going to shoot at me if I got any closer or stuck out, I thought. There had to be a way out of there. My sister was gone. I slunk and slid very low and suddenly I was on the street, sneaking by the parked cars with my head low. There wasn’t any shooting, at least. Then I was on a bus. I needed to go to my house and that wasn't very far. I should have checked the bus number. Wait, buses in Caracas don't have numbers, just the origin and designation as the name of the line. We're going the right way, though, trundling along Calle El Lago.

Can't remember getting to the house, although I know every detail of the bus stop, the two corner shops, one with political graffiti on the wall in changing forms but always the same since the '60s. My house has changed so much but it feels the same. My room has grown. B' was there. There were two of them, one as she is now and a younger one, more like the one I'd known back then in the mist of time, when she would never have considered falling in love with me. Except neither of them looked very much like her. And both wanted to stay. It was time to go to bed and each of them in turned said something about that. I had a problem. Each of them was showing the most bitter jealousy towards the other. I thought there'd been a large double-sized bed in my room but there were only two narrow single beds. Even more of a problem…. how was I going to sort this out without scenes and shouts. I tried to put the beds together but they were so heavy. The two 'B''s were standing there, arms folded. Maybe I should decide it was a dream and I should wake up soon, couldn't see any other way out of this.

not ice cream

Not sure why I was there again, with those loud men I was a little bit afraid of, in their shop and therefore in their territory.. Or why I then asked whether they still made that famous ice-cream, which, they said they still did. A waiter brought a tub which I opened. The contents were certainly not ice-cream, but what looked like food left-over, bits of kebab meat and potato salad. "You ordered it and now you have to eat it all, or we would be offended. You know, rules of the house", said the middle age man in the white shirt and shades. The table was now surrounded by their staff, all standing in hieratic poses. In the distance, the clouds were gathering and darkening and the sky was turning purple and red. The storm was coming. I looked at the disgusting mess in the ice-cream tub and looked around. Hostile faces, no gaps to run through them. The only way out would be to wake up...

The Enemy

A little brush with the most terrifying dream in the world.

I woke up in shivers, my head under the blanket -and didn't dare open my eyes or move. I knew 'it' or he, whatever it is, was in the room. I knew what was happening: about to unfold, the final encounter between me, another iteration of me who also was in the room but who I couldn't see or sense, just knew he -or me, was there, and the Enemy, so inconceivably bigger and also smaller, so difficult to imagine even, without a face although 'he' could choose to appear with any face he wanted. Perhaps a Demon, or the very master of the demons, whatever they truly were… 'demon' is only a word, has a lot of connotations of theism and religion. What I was dealing with was similar but different -if it was indeed different, as I couldn't get to know what it truly was; a being that was the sum total of terror and evil, larger and smaller than anything in the world and the world itself. In my dreams I've recurrently brushed with the story many many times. I can never remember the whole story once awake, it is a little bit as if something inside my mind was trying to protect me from remembering too much about it. I know I have, purposefully or unintendedly, challenged this being, who sometimes I battle with and defeat momentarily, sometimes at the cost of the destruction of my old house in Catia or my whole home city, but it is a temporary respite; we escape or hide but we know it is going to happen again and in the end of time we will lose. That is what I know about the story, of which I get glimpses, different iterations with different developments, each time I dream. More often we're on the run trying to escape from it, or hiding in what remains of my old house, or there is a temporary respite when I have found a way to conceal my hiding place or my presence from the Evil Being. This, alas, can be done only for a little while.

The Enemy has just half-woken me up, a brush of cold void to make me wake up in terror, just for fun perhaps or maybe with some purpose that is beyond what I can comprehend. It is not 'me', this iteration of me that he is about to fight and, given the overwhelming odds, probably defeat and destroy today. But all the same I know it is me in a deeper sense who is out there and unaware of me under the blankets not daring to open my eyes. Tension and terror rise and I finally wake up in cold sweat, my cat pounding the mattress next to my face and making little noises indicating she's completely spooked. I daren't open my eyes: I know I'm still dreaming and there may be many more layers of dream to get through before I truly wake up -my poor little kitty has been dead for many years.

in red

You float downstream into the red channels, something sloshes near. You know you're not really there but it is more real than reality. In some sense you really are there, but you need to get out. At some point, along the maze of canals and tunnels criss-crossing in front of you, you saw a point of white light in the distance, surely daylight and the real world -you headed for that point of light but quickly lost your way again in the labyrinth of tunnels, the red pulsating light in them making the views dim and indistinct. There are distant noises, apart from the liquid noises and the pulse that envelopes you; there are whooshing and scraping noises that you can just about make out in the distance. Ah, there's the point of white light. There, it's lost again…

And at some point I'll have to wake up, without having found my way, which means I'll find myself in this maze again, or a similar one, when I next fall asleep and dream. It assumes many forms… there is the maze on Floor 10, where I have to find my uncle's apartment but the lifts and stairs don't take you there, you have to find your way through a series of lifts that take you part of the way, then find the horizontal lift, whatever that means, then the stairs that take you there, to that apartment in shade, full of long-leaved plants in pots, ancient portraits on the wall which I can never quite make out in the semi-darkness, the series of bathrooms, one of which is assigned to me but I can never find so I have to use the other ones but they're almost all of them broken, the radio that will bring me news from outside, an ancient radio from the '30s with names of cities on the dial, 'London', 'Paris', 'Moscow…' but it is mostly static and suddenly a crackled, broken voice in a foreign language I cannot make out…

And then I'm again in the red tunnels, on a craft of some sort, being taken down the canals at speed, trying to steer towards where I think there is that white point of light...

drifting through the halls of mirrors 1

I was in a hall and there was a concert in progress. It was supposed to be Neubauten, playing a acoustic set un-amplified. People had been waiting for this concert for ages but now that it was happening they were bored. The band was almost drowned by the voices of people in the audience. Nobody was heckling as such but people were calling out as they left the hall, calling at each other "going to the pub, you coming along?”, “Get me a pint” and similar.

So the band stopped and people hardly noticed as there was almost no-one left in the hall and those remaining were talking so loudly. I went over to the stage area and was surprised to see that they had packed up already, in only a couple of minutes. Ok, so perhaps it wasn't Neubauten; on the stage there was a young very tall man in a suit. Expensive suit, I thought. Expensive but a little bit tacky. . I congratulated them and expressed surprise at the fact that they could pack their stuff away so quickly.

One turn and I am at the gym, on top of that contraption they call a 'cross-trainer'. I hate those places and for a moment I'm not quite really there. And my eyes are closed. What difference is there, I'm walking down the empty corridors in the last Battlestar ship as it hurtles downm towards the sun, or in a desert beginning the ascent as the unseen hecklers throw stones at me and call me by the name Mercer, which is not my name but it doesn't matter. Nothing does now...

morning

Getting up and leaving the house early is still so difficult for me. Maybe

At least it is day-light when I leave the  house even if it is that preternatural misty white light of doom that makes you feel like you're in a mystery movie, or exploring some alien hostile world. Ok, perhaps I exaggerate slightly. Although you do see hostile looking beings with their pasty white faces, scuttling past clutching their umbrellas..

Spring is coming ok, but winter still not giving in.