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Re: A Sullen Dream
I've rewritten the above:
A SULLEN DREAM (revised)
A dream last night that was so vivid I wonder if I’m now dreaming about it. I was the protagonist of the dream. Most dreamers are, I guess. But I wonder if we take this too much for granted. The expression that kept coming to my mind during the dream was ‘spiritually empty’. Another phrase that kept cropping up was ‘a thin in a tin’. As spiritually empty as a thin in a tin. Not a thing in a tin: a thin in a tin. The buildings in the dream’s city – a city, now, in hindsight – were grey and drained, with flat roofs and top edges like battlements more jaggedly sharp than squarely bricked. I walked inside a church and the walls were covered in purple hangings, grey purple, so grey hardly purple at all, as if a black and white film had been mixed then stained rather than tinted. The aura of sanctity seemed off-putting as I wondered who were in the curtained-over confessionals. I seemed to know instinctively that these cubicles had people in them, but there was no evidence to prove that was the case, except for the assumed pregnant silence of private prayer after absolution. I cannot recall there being any pews in the body of the church on either side of the iconostasis. I then left the church and, later, squeezed down the end of a tunnel alongside a train that almost filled the tunnel. It seemed fully seated with people, and I felt I was expected to board it and to travel in the same direction as the tunnel, which was in the same direction I was walking, walking, walking beside the train, feeling for a door. Eventually I managed to hoist myself aboard. The people inside were sullen. I knew instinctively that we would all soon be heading towards a state called ‘death’. This was it, then. This was the way we all died. And nobody knows this until they do die. If I had known then that it was a dream, I assume I would have thought that I would never wake up from it but fall asleep forever in the dream’s own terms. It was then I noticed a thin young woman who seemed less sullen than the other passengers and I thought she was trying to talk to me over the shoulder of the passenger seated between us. But abruptly other sullen passengers squashed on board, thus making this a rush hour and I could no longer see the young woman in the shoulder-to-shoulder standing-room silence. Eventually, the train started moving – not further into the tunnel as I had expected but out of the tunnel ... into the direction from where I had just come – back into the city of battlements.
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