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...

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.

book

I was reading a book, a large and complicated story. Sometimes I had to go back a few chapters to understand some complex development, sometimes I even had to go forward to find out other things. As soon as I was reading a chapter I got immersed in it, it'd become real, vivid and I could not only see and hear but also feel the world I was in. At some point I realised I wasn't reading somebody else's book, I was making up the story and I needed to write it. But then I woke up and all I could remember was this I have written, the sort of structure of the dream and the book but nothing of the contents, lost and vanished forever in the void.

Corridor

There I am again, moving down corridors somewhere unknown, although it may be the Building and I may be trying to make my way to the tenth floor, like so many times. Or perhaps I'm coming back from it and trying to find my way out on to the street. At this point I don't know; I can only plod on, open ever new door and hatch that appears in my way, follow the many twists and turns down the corridors and hope they take me somewhere. There are side doors but I feel I ought not to try those. I give in and open one of those: a service pit or well, metal stairways or ladders as far up and down as I can see, as well as valves and tube joints letting off a sort of steam. It is dizzying and does not appear to offer a better possibility of getting out of here than the corridors.

Another hatch which opens only with some effort then clunks and puffs open with a sigh. Beyond, the corridor splits into many corridors. No way to tell one from another or which can get me out of here. If this is a dream, I tell myself, this is a good moment to try and wake up.

fuse

I had been doing something upstairs for quite a long time. ‘Upstairs’ was my old house in Catia, the one I grew up with. I came downstairs into my Granddad’s kitchen to .. make coffee, I think. The hub was very hot, couldn’t touch it, there was a pan with something already black on it. I had a glass semi-hidden up a pipe that ran outside a wall; it wasn’t clear to me why I had hidden the glass but I think I didn’t trust the other occupants of the house to clean the crockery properly. There was another glass in the place where I’d put mine, but one that was very dirty. Needed to get the hub going but it wouldn’t start. Then I realised it was very dark. Flicking the light switch on wasn’t easy, it was very hard to push -and it didn’t do anything, no lights came up. Came out of the kitchen, realising this was a house-wide problem, maybe the cooker had been left on for a very long time and had made the fuses blow. I called out even though I knew my granddad wasn’t in the house. It was darker now and getting very very cold and I had no idea where the fusebox was (it would be fuses, 1940s style, not breakers) and getting so dark that I couldn’t negotiate my way through the furniture strewn along the corridor.. Then the bell started tolling in the distance...

Still here. She was still here. She smiled, her long beautiful wavy long blond mane tumbling to one side as she reclined in the back seat of the car looking up into my face -outside, a group of young girls (her sisters? I thought she only had one, older sister) were trying to catch her attention. She looked at me and smiled, made a gesture that meant 'wait' to the girls who were peering into the car through the windows. I had to resist the temptation -she seemed to be inviting me to kiss her, but that was forbidden and would break the spell. She closed her eyes, I moved down, hid my face in her neck, kissed her neck and instantly woke up, awash in a flood of longing for things impossible which never had been there.

Sam, the Croatian guy from W, was expecting me for a lesson and I was already late. His wait must have lasted all night: there had been travels, the usual dream mishaps where I get lost in a train (a double decker train with many people and things happening in it) on the eternal journey south-east and at some point I misplace my guitar and have to spend much time and many adventures retrieving it; finally I'm there but S's lesson still has to wait, there is some sort of gathering and She is there. Beautiful as she once was, we hug and I can feel the shape of her body under her loose robes. She wants me to stay but S's lesson is waiting. The cat next to her makes some guttural noises and she says she, too, has to attend to something. Now she has become just a head on a sort of little box, I' concerned that the cat may attack her as she's vulnerable without arms or legs and in that tiny size; I light a candle and put it next to her but then I worry that the candle may tumble and burn her -even though she tells me she'll be ok, she's ok and can look after herself. The cat seems bigger now and is making some half-purring, half-growling noises, while the candle has become very narrow and thin and keeps falling and I have to re-position it. S is still waiting for his guitar lesson.

up and away

I only remember the end, but there was much before.we seemed to have defeated the alien, whatever it was, and you and I had found the ship, which was in a lot full of rubbish behind the house in Catia, It wasn't an alien, though, but some sort of demonic (to all it something) entity and, as we found the tiny ship and were going to go into it, then suddenly my point of view changes and I'm both flavio entering the little ship and my friend coming after and the Entity, watching it all from some sort of undead state outside and triggering the ship, which I now see from the house rising int the sky with me inside, which I cannot see from that point of view but I know I'm screaming and futilely punching the door latch as the ship disappears up into the sky.

brief

She was very much as she was then. Slender, olive skinned, with flowing brown hair and a fresh face. She had been standing next to me, explaining who she was until I told her I knew, how could I not know. I smiled, turned over and made as if to sleep. She came down behind and put her arms around me. I could feel her smile. We were together. Then I woke up with that terrible longing for irretrievable times long past.

after the rainstorm

Ah. Still hadn't written out those two dreams. The one about the disturbance after the rainstorm still vivid in my head, but the other one is gone,can't remember it now. My room on that top floor, a roof more or less, on top of a tall building. The leaks. My sister had been there earlier, but she wasn't there now. I check to make sure the guitar and the bed are not under the leaks, the many leaks letting in lots of rain into the room. The noises of disturbances outside, the thunderstorm but also shots and shouting.I come out onto the roof to see what is happening. There were two naked men with guns hijacking cars during the riot. A lot of shouting and cursing, could see people looking out from windows and balconies and hurrying back in. There were people lying on the street, injured or dead, bloodied, very still; people driving madly in all directions. Sirens, police cars; the two naked men hijacking a very lime green volkswagen beetle. I heard angry voices near and knew some people were coming to get me, but there was nowhere to hide on that roof. I made for an entrance to an emergency stairs and crouched in a nook… What was the other dream about, what was it...

Pinwheel

The many sets of coordinates, the infinite configuration spaces that contain us and define us and the vst array of possible us, the blurry demarcations, the uncertain limits and borders of what we are. I open my eyes in the middle of the night, I think 'it is night, it is I, what does all that mean'. Outside, the vast pinwheel firework of the universe continues its blind careening burning itself in a mad dash of entropy towards oblivion, one that is too slow for us to register, perhaps mercifully. Beyond that, who knows. In the meantime, I stare at the ceiling in the dark, I think of many things to do with impermanence and the transience of life and of being, I sigh and turn around and try to sleep again.

a dream of lost guitar

In that dream I lost my guitar. That hadn't happened that I can recall... often I'd found myself without my guitar in a dream but it was always that I was in Venezuela, unable to make it back to England and my guitar, my pupils and my things. This case was different. I was with Carlos -whichever of the many calls that might have been, and we were trying to make our way back from the ... was it the airport? from a terminal building, in any case, but had had to walk miles in the dark, stopping by the second bus stop from the terminal; we get on the bus and I realise that I've left my guitar, my one good concert guitar that's been with me for the last thirty-five years, on the stone bench by the bus stop, in the middle of nowhere. Carlos has gone to the top deck of the bus, I haven't got a mobile phone with me so I have to shout to him, has he got my guitar -but it is too noisy and he's far at the back of the bus... I try to move over to where the steps for the top deck are but people are in the way, some rather noisy boisterous young people get in my way, apparently trying to get me to share their drink. By the time I get closer, Carlos has left the bus and we have arrived to wherever the bus was going. I trout get the bus back to go to that desolate bus stop in the middle of nowhere in case the guitar might still be there unstolen, but there won't be another one until tomorrow. I make it home, finally, and check all my guitars in case I had taken the wrong one (after all, would I have taken my best guitar without any sort of case to protect it), but it's all the others there ok -I have lost it. A cleaner I don't remember having hired is busy cleaning the guitars and making them shiny. Then I wake up. And, yes, I had to go and check the guitar was still there on its stand as always, and not in some desolate wilderness by a country road in a gloomy country of dreams.

A night alone far away

Not knowing exactly (or at all) what this all may be about... I looked up. A twinkling point of light up there. Could it be that that was the sun? Who knows, I suspect it is impossible to see the Sun from here without some kind of high power telescope. Check out ob my instruments but no data.

I went out on the plain for a walk. The silence. Only the reflected, shifting light from the gas giant, Ahriman, which fills a third of the sky. And stars, unknown stars. I bounced a little bit, playing with the lower gravity. I went back in, took the suit helmet off, picked up the reader and sat again at the console.

I have no memory of how I got here. I am aware of a sort of black gap in my memory, when I try to think about the missing bits there I just end up having a headache. Play music, instead; Chopin will do tonight. Tonight? What does that mean, tonight?

This place is in geosynchronous orbit with Ahriman. The angry colour bands of the gas giant are always there, change position very little in the sky. Of course there is a planetary day and night but they last a little over a week, not a cycle that I could or would want to sustain as a sleep-awake cycle. I can hear myself breath. Turn the music off, try to sleep. Play sounds of surf, make myself think of waves crashing against reefs on the shore. No waves, no shores here. Don't think of anything, just float downstream and let go off the mystery.

Dreams are even stranger. The usual dreams of being chased, of going back to my childhood home which is now unrecognisable and sometimes hostile, sometimes actively hostile. Of flying, or rather floating in a stream which is part of a gigantic, perhaps infinite maze, a system of canals with foaming water, walls red as blood, the sound of rushing waters. Of trying to find my way in a building where there is something or somebody important who I have to get hold of or something terrible is going to happen. Of returning home and finding a stranger with my face and my name, only younger and handsome and evil, living there with an achingly beautiful woman I may have seen in another dream. But he is not me, not another manifestation of me in a different world track, not an evil twin or a different instance of me in the shift space of the possibilities of the universe; no, that is some avatar of the entity in the worst dream in the world, the thing full of malice and power whose glancing encounters have made me wake up in sheer terror, short of breath and panting, trying hard to forget what I had been dreaming.

I'm not in sheer terror. There is this sudden silence and eery calm, just the figures on the screen readouts glowing in the dark, slowly changing. I am alone. The evil presence is not here, I don't think, but I am alone, I don't know how I came to be here or why, or the purpose of it. I scan the radio frequencies one more time. There is nothing, just the background static of the universe, scant company in this long, long night away from home and from everything, just the unseen presence of the huge gas giant hovering above, tugging at me from a couple of light minutes away, baleful and relentless.

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.