Dream Passage of the Day

[G. S. Carnivals]

At the edge of the moment, I fell into a dream. But there was nobody around to catch me. . . and I continued falling straight into a strange darkness (which was neither sleep nor dream) where finally there were arms that gathered me together like a mother discovering her aged child for the very first time.

But all I could do was wriggle free and search through the dripping warmth for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Eventually, without any warning at all, I woke from the moment and entered the hopefully endless minutes that remained of my life.

But at my back was the night, and out of that night there reached the scrawny arms for light and became the shadows of my sight.

D. F. Lewis - "Shadows of Sight"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"Reports are coming in of a dream sickness affecting the whole population. A whining whistle that makes each ear as big as a balloon. Bloated with a fine scrimshaw of veins like low-key rivers flowing with hushed currents towards a sea of white noise which, in turn, shafts like heavenly light from the dream to the very edge of reality which the dream fails to contain. Or fails so far."

D. F. Lewis - "Left Foot (2)"

[G. S. Carnivals]

When the lady with the whistling ears saw the box pews, she automatically thought of a library full of private-study carrels with only a sparse number of communal tables furnished between the carrels - tables which nobody seemed to use, presumably because the reading duties in this place were more than normally private and avoidance at all costs was required regarding any heads leaning too far over to pry into what someone else was studying. However, the church was louder than a normal library, because prayer meant more noise than the brain-wrinkled approach to literature or history or philosophy would otherwise entail. Even so, the lady with loud ears knew it was indeed a library. So, not box-pews but carrels after all, even though the students installed therein were high-necked with the garb of nuns or of a sisterhood that required the garb of nuns even if they were not nuns at all.

As she peered closer, by skirting a few randomly chosen carrels - the wooden walls over which she managed to snoop - she discerned that the books were not being properly read, but rather catalogued after only a cursory inspection of its pages, some stuck together with substances she did not care to imagine being anything other than unfixed foxing. However, she was soon noticed when one of her ears gave out a particularly unbecoming shriek. Like a prayer coming back to her.

The nearest nun climbed from her chair and propped her chin on the carrel wall: “What you doing, Madam? Do you need any assistance?” The shiny face scowled within the oval frame of her hood. The book she had lately been inspecting she clasped to her chest like a Bible she planned to defend at all costs. The Lady of Whistles tried to scowl back but was not sure whether she succeeded, because the nun evidently thought she had made quite a different facial expression. “You should not smirk. There is no entry here. How did you get in?”

Meanwhile, other shiny-faced nuns had emerged from their box-carrels and stood around like statuesque predatory birds. Each clasping the book they had been interrupted processing. The first nun to have been disturbed beckoned the man standing at the door to come out of the shadows and do his job: whether it be security or negotiation with strangers or punishment of interlopers or whatever his duties entailed. He appeared to be dressed as a circus clown, but only subtly so, as our Lady of Whistles was not quite sure whether this was the intended impression he intended to give. He however lost no time in opening his bright lips to say:

“I spend each day climbing a mountain. But they never let me come down. How can I climb the next mountain, I ask, when I’m still atop the previous one? But I still manage to climb the next mountain without having first climbed down the previous one. How do you think that is?”

His tone of voice seemed to indicate that he blamed the intruder for whatever his predicament happened to be, not the nuns who must have really known more about his situation than they were letting on.

The lady, adjusting the ear that had earlier shrieked, asked: “Do you jump from one to another?”

The clown grew flustered. “Dear Lady, how does that allow me to climb each mountain. My job is to climb mountains, not cheating by jumping from one to another.”

“Can you not climb down them, then.”

“Climb means to go up not go down,” the clown muttered, as if he himself was now questioning the nature of his own complaint.

“Hmmm… but people do suffer themselves to have climb-downs when they have been too precocious or premature in their certainties.” The lady said this while backing away from direct confrontation with the security guard.

He, in his turn, had drifted into deep thought. As if his whole claim to climb mountains every day would eventually entail such a climb-down as the lady with the noisy ears had suggested, in her subtle way of saying something without really saying it.

The next time he turned his face upward for communication to be renewed between them, his face was tear-stained into twin rainbows of eye-shadow. And he recited parrot-fashion a famous extract from an even more famous book – tantamount to a prose fable that, as was gathered later, indeed too late, was the passage the shiny-faced nuns had all day been seeking in the books they had been inspecting.

Sunniman the Scarf loved soccer. Most of his friends, however, were rugby fans and rather looked down upon Sunniman the Scarf for his interest in soccer. He dreamt of them strangling him with his own supporter’s scarf. Then they hung him from it in a large tree towards the edge of the dream, where the sun was a soccer ball in the sky – until one of the friends lifted a hand and plucked it from the sky and replaced it with a sun more similar to a rugby ball. Until God climbed down from Heaven as far as the sky and replaced it with something more suitable for Sunniman’s dream. This was a shiny-faced orange. But God was not alone in the sky. There was God, also. And God. And God. And, oh yes, of course, there was God. Which made God angry as he did not find himself in the sky. And he plucked God from the sky and replaced him with God. And God climbed down further to see Sunniman the Scarf in the tree, his arms becoming the very branches. And the sun grew hotter. This was God climbing even further down to watch the others in the dream kicking Sunniman’s head like a football. The Sun had not only grown a lot hotter, but a mad hatter, too. Got its hat on. Hip hip hip hooray.

The ears were piercing as she began to climb a staircase of jutting spines (or a single spine with individual juts) towards the next geometrically impossible staircase leading down where only sense would allow it to lead up. Tomorrow there would be another to scale. She clasped a large book to her chest. She did despair, however, of ever reading between its lines for the ultimate truth. And, flanked by various versions of herself, she cast yet another prayer like a pager shrike into the echo-chamber of death, a death she so dearly sought so as to ease the increasingly unbearable pain in her heavy unvented head. But nobody heard her prayers but herself. The clown was dead at his own feet.

D. F. Lewis - "Climb Down Every Mountain"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"He put his wife to bed, in the hope she would improve by morning. He kept vigil the night through, tending to the weeping sores that broke out around her front-loader.

He must have dozed off, because following the dream of the sea creature, he saw the bald head of a vile bird forcing itself through the bedroom wall, as if from a giant cuckoo-clock. Its neck was long, indeed, but before it could reach out to give Ashley a peck, its snapping beak abruptly hinged back on itself and swallowed whole the wattled head whence it came.

Ashley glanced at his wife who was at that moment tossing in the bed - and she cried out in evident desperation to what had become a blurred image of her husband: 'Ashley, everything in me is coming free and flopping about...'

Ashley Lime shrugged - he put it all down to what he called 'things he couldn’t possibly understand.'"

D. F. Lewis - "Ashley Lime"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"Taking the initiative, he grabbed the weighty clock and carried it up the steep stairs to the dark landing. He felt it throbbing in his hand, as if it were trying to impart something. Easy to believe that all the die-cast shafts, fly-wheels and cogs were teetering on the brink of tangled grinding, ratchetting, meshing - until the brazen clangour of the alarm-bell erupted. The hammer oscillated violently between the ringing walls of his skull, mistaking dark for deafness.

The workings of the clock eventually wound down with soft springy whimpers like a beloved pet dying - simply sensed by the hands rather than the ears. Graham was, of course, unaware of the creatures with winding-hole eyes that wanted shelter from the rain, summoned by the bell down the chimney, moving like furry clockwork toys, snicker-snacking up the dim stair-well behind him...

The shopkeeper smiled mischievously in her sleep. Nearby were the bare luminous numbers of her own Art Nouveau alarm-clock, one with soundless movement. Mr Donkin snored beside her."

D. F. Lewis - "Soundless Movement"

[G. S. Carnivals]

Magic in a dream is what it isn't in real life.

Ordinary explicable events and things that do NOT go bump in the night are the magic in dreams.

Magic in life was impossible events ... like real ghosts and, of course, love affairs.

Rose-Anne brought magic into my waking hours when she sat upon a park bench close to mine. She disappeared even before I could discover her name ... or I did.

I now sleep all the time.

D. F. Lewis - "Rose-Anne"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"O starer!"

The woman whose nose was more like a ship's prow than a scythe stared back at the vocative creature that disturbed her chamber by night.

I knew you'd stare at me first if I didn't start staring, was its ear-tickling reply. This whimsical wraith retained the characteristics of a wingless, yet feathery, bat, as it stared with lips as well as eyelids. The tongue was particularly blatant, a tiny eyeball embedded in the gristle of its sponge tip.

The woman dreamt she dreamt seeing the flittery critter while, in truth, remaining awake and not seeing it.

Only one more dream and you will actually begin to see me with your naked eyes, said a pointed flicker.

But I already dreamed you visiting me yesterday.

But you've forgotten the dream itself.

Yes, yes, yes, real dreams are so easily forgotten.

And the woman closed her tired eyes ... with an attractive wrinkling of a nose which cut through the tides of night.

She sighed: a moment of anguish and love. Did normal people have imaginary dreams while she imagined real ones?

She didn't know which cut deeper. Whispers or wisps.

D. F. Lewis - "Tides of Night"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"At night, the sea-city lit up like a fairground, for that’s what it really was, when daylight’s disguise was lifted. The big Ferris Wheel not only revolved on its own axis, with interlocking fairy lights colour-changing in an arcane rhythm adopted from the tides, but also appeared to move along the promenade like a landlocked extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Those same drifters of the morning had found their destination, the huddlecots madeshift by the council for their benefit along the crumbling sea-wall in the shape of holiday beach-huts ... wherein they now slept to reach the dreams for which they’d yearned all the daylight hours.

They dreamed the same dream of death - that they were each dreamed by the same dreamer."

D. F. Lewis - "Orphans of the Tides"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"King George abruptly shouts and momentarily stirs from his own dream, a dream that is within Brian's dream; the pity of it being that there is nobody near to hear his shout except himself. He does not answer, retracting his tortoise-head into a new shell of convoluted dreams."

D. F. Lewis - "A Study in Brown"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"My episodic dream continued, ignoring all efforts to wake it up."

D. F. Lewis - "Lady-Day in Harvest"