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 cathedral 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 sat 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 cathedral on either side of the iconostasis.
I then left the cathedral 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 backward direction as the tunnel, which was in the same forward direction I was walking, walking, walking beside the train, feeling for a door. Eventually I managed to hoist myself aboard. The people inside were the sullen ones who gave this dream its imprimatur. 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 more sullen would-be passengers squashed on board after me, thus making this a rush hour and I could no longer see the young woman within the new 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. Or had I got my original expectations back to front?
I saw suddenly some sullen ones rattling tins towards me, as if expecting me to insert a coin in the top of each of them. A trainload of loafers, beggars, even refugees for non-refugee reasons. So why was I, a solid citizen, on board? And did I have enough loose change in my pockets to quell any recrimination? No wonder I had felt so weighed down when walking to where I had walked, knowing such weights would sink me should I jump into the nearest river? Not stone, not bricks, but massive amounts of loose change for just this pleading eventuality on a train. Sullen being a quiet form of desperation. Faces facing me upon the brink of a brink that would scream out in perfect unison the words of some arcane importuning. Rhythmic swells and counter-swells of preparatory breathing as undertow to the train’s slow quickening of its trundling. I turned to the window, as if ignoring these faces would make them vanish, and I saw the battlements were not battlements at all but chimneystacks massed in messy patterns around the cathedral’s massive dome where under I had viewed tiers of purple-draped confessionals.
I then knew this was not a dream at all but a state of experience that had happened to no-one until now. Not a state within sleep, nor within waking, nor within waking dream or half-dozing, not even a wayward day-dreaming, not an after-death experience, nor a pre-birth one, indeed not any possible concept at all that could possibly create a state of experience in anyone at all, ever! — whatever the wild philosophy or occult religion one adopted. So, was it the impossible state of story in words come true? I suddenly smelt the signs of a stench that would kill us all. Luckily, it was impossible to smell, so what happened next was neither a surprise or an expectation. It just was. And I felt my head to see if it was still there, a dome far too big to be mine. Rattling along the rails backward into the tunnel toward the kilns of squashed-into-shape slot-trepanning. It was me who screamed instead. But luckily I was now one of the other sullen ones looking at me scream in sullen silence like Munch. And I confess I could continue forever trying to avoid an ending to end this ‘state of story’, unless it was a clinching and satisfying ending for these endlessly grey blocks of purple prose.A happy ending, too.
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