The dream box

At 3am I was awakened by the sound of struggle.
The TV whistled to the sound of static and its glare lit up vague bookcases filled with things I may have read. The couch stank with the droppings of a day and night spent filling oneself with carbohydrates and poisons.
I stood groggily. A tiny fly buzzed by my hand. The curtains stood open and I saw mellow streetlamps fizzing on the other side of the road.
I could hear Sarah in the bedroom. Her twisting movements on the mattress caused the sheets to whisper and the springs to croak. She spoke, but too quietly to be heard between walls.
My mind moved slowly, as if through water, like a mill-wheel or the great paws of a bear. She must have come in sometime after eleven. She mustn’t have wanted to wake me. But why didn’t she turn the TV off at least?
I sensed objects moments before I crashed into them or stubbed my toe. The buzz of the fly and the TV faded to the tune of Sarah’s breath. She swallowed air like she was drowning somewhere.
I made it to the hallway and could see that the door to the bedroom was open wide. I slid over the passage by stretching my arms forth and allowing them to catch my weight as I dripped across the space. There I held myself, crucified within the wooden frame of the door, staring at Sarah.
The curtains were drawn tightly in there and it took perhaps a minute for my pupils to compensate for the freshness of the darkness. And there she struggled, against the whims of her mind, against the heat of the morning, against the suffocating covers that she gripped like a lover.
Collapsing then, into the room I loomed over the foot of the bed like a spreading ghoul, a watching phantom delighting in his handiwork. Using the edge of the bed as my guide to her, I moved around keeping Sarah always in my gaze.
She spoke to someone, entreating them. Such a helpless thing she was, and as I saw the sweat trickling from her brow I moved to wipe it clear; moved but slipped to my knees at her side.
And there, in a small box floating perpendicular to the bedside I could see her dream; sparking, cold and full of fear. All life and colour was being drained slowly from the screen before me. Inside it, Sarah floundered in the midst of a muddy veil as black shapes, amorphous clouds of soot, flitted about pushing down this grey net around her so that it began to cut into her lips and gums when she screamed.
I tried to get to my feet, to turn myself off from the horror I was viewing, but in either field of my vision I could see separate Sarahs writhing in synchronized agonies and I was transfixed.
I sat there, watching those demons plague her until the light from the dream grew as dim as the room. As the final drop of colour and the last pinprick of light faded from the dream box, my head slumped against the mattress. Soon I joined Sarah in dreams again, and my head whirled there until morning.
When the daylight lifted my eyelids several hours later I was damp and shivering and crawled into bed beside her. She’d discarded the quilt and was now sleeping coolly in a loose ball. I dragged the covers back on with my last drops of strength and sanity and snuggled in behind her.
Time stabilised soon after, our temperatures aligned and our bodies took on that soundless motionless sleep; the sort of sleep that adults envy in their children, as they watch them in fear and awe each night. They stand there helpless wondering where their child has gone to, what they are seeing and how they can possibly protect them there.

Clouds

The feeling of floating above the clouds is a queer one.
If you let it, it can take you over. You could get lost in a kingdom of cloud, see castles with soldiers and dragons attacking. Something about these fat mountains, wisping into new dimensions before your eyes, turns one’s head back to childhood dreaming.
I once took my grandfather with me on a transatlantic flight to New York, to visit my sister. It promised to be an uncomfortable journey; a long flight interlaced with stilted conversation and awkward silences. Still, there were always the clouds.
I remember the first time I flew in a plane. I was an adult yet I was stuck to the window in delight as a million synapses fired at once, relaying memories of candy floss and ginger beer, chasing pig-tails and climbing trees, mud seas and bloodied knees. And now I was above all that.
I travel by air routinely now, but it still stirs up some of those feelings, and it did that day flying with grandpa. I looked away from the clouds when I heard the clinking trolley of the air-stewardess but my grandfather, in the window seat today, stared on at the rolling white ocean below us. The stewardess had to touch his shoulder to see if he wanted a drink. She may have been checking to see if he was dead, too.
Then, as we enjoyed an in-flight brandy or two, my grandfather began to speak.
He told me how he had longed to fly above those clouds in his youth; and how he had loved flying above them in his adulthood.
“I would take every opportunity available to me to taste the higher air,” he said, “And get closer to those white angels dancing in the fluffy sky.”
He didn’t look at me many times while he recalled his time amongst the clouds, and at times I couldn’t tell if his memories were real or fantasy. His words were laden with romance and it seemed as though he had at one time managed to grow wings and flown like a migrating swan to reach the heavens.
The war was raging and there he was, a flying delivery boy transporting whatever was needed to wherever he was told.
He said how lucky he was to be able to fly so often back then and recounted a tale from those days:
“Often the sky would run black with smoke and man-made clouds would burst my white castles and set them aflame.
I would stay calm by searching out any little speck of white in the distance and focusing on it and striving towards it with all my might. Anything to leave behind the grey reek of the flak.
I was doing a similar journey to the one we’re on right now, in the June of 1940, when one of my engines caught fire during an attack on our convoy. It spread to the wing so my co-pilot and I bailed out.
In a way, I’d always longed for the chance to jump, the opportunity to step onto the clouds. It almost made me cry when my body flashed through them like they weren’t even there.
They might look substantial, like a dream taken form, but they’re really just clouds of water vapour.
I thought about this as I plummeted, and I didn’t want to open the parachute, not for a long time. But something in me, maybe when I saw those blue Atlantic waters rushing at me, something made me relent and I pulled the ripcord and slowed sufficiently to hit the water safely.
I bobbed around there for a few hours before a passing trade ship happened to spot me. I looked up, helpless once more, and saw the clouds turn to white again.
And as I looked up at that colossal sky I was thinking, ‘Maybe I just picked the wrong cloud? Just the wrong cloud to walk on?’ ”
He finished his drink and then didn’t say anything for a while. I looked and saw that he’d fallen to sleep.
He was back in the land of dreams now, where anything can happen. So when the stewardess brought our dinner I asked her not to wake him.
We let him sleep awhile longer. We let him sleep there in the sky for as long as we could.

High Apartment

The cheap scotch nearly knocked him sick. He opened his wet mouth wide and allowed one ice cube to slide down the tumbler glass and plop perfectly between his teeth, onto his fat tongue.
There he held the cube for a moment before sending it, with a flick of the neck, to the back of his throat. The shock of the snap from the ice alleviated any feeling of nausea.
He glanced over the transcript of the latest dream. He had taken to getting up and writing down immediately, everything he could remember from his dreams, before consciousness wiped them out and they became relics of memory, or the stuff of déjà vu.
His desk, his room, was a mess. With a slight kick of his heels the chair rolled back until the hard wall stopped it. A path through the clutter had been cleared to allow this regular smooth meeting of chair and wall.
Standing, to pull up his pants, the man knocked the blind which flowed upwards, accompanied by a razzing sound, and away. Moonlight bathed the room.
The man moved a few steps, switched off his desk lamp and just enjoyed swimming in this new spotlight, this fresh ambience.
He barely touched the blind. He wouldn’t have touched it tonight, on purpose, but now that it was open and redundant he was struck by its pointlessness as a visual barrier.
No buildings were level with his floor, none higher. He could wave his penis at the window all night and who would care?
“Probably why I keep it closed,” he said aloud, tending to the fiddly process of closing the blind before he bothered to pull up his jeans.
Then he shuffled on, towards the fire-escape; towards the roof and the air.
The cool night air relaxed him and he sucked it in to his lungs. He enjoyed the sound of the traffic far below, and the hum of planes far above. He enjoyed the fact that he could hear no human voices up here; no people talking inanities, discussing the weather (which was pleasant this evening), and re-arranging the minutiae of their lives.
He thought about throwing a small piece of broken brick from the roof, or maybe a coin. He could imagine it hitting something below. But he reconsidered, as there were few people on the streets at this time of night.
He lit two cigarettes and laid them down upon a low brick wall. The man was standing amid the remains of a roof terrace that had been ripped up and conquered long before it had the chance to become overgrown. All that was left now were memories of the life that once grew here.
His thoughts were stuck on falling, that sucking hungry pull that mankind fights so hard against; the benevolent force which keeps us standing still on this ridiculous spinning flying rock of ours.
He’d read, just last week, of a woman who was killed by a man who fell through her skylight. If he wandered to the edge of his building, he wondered if he might see a skylight window below, someone who might be able to see him, or something to aim for.
He decided against looking. The wind was getting up and he hadn’t brought his shirt, he saw goose pimples on his arms and rubbed at them. The two cigarettes were about burnt out. He took these one by one, dropped each on the flagged floor and crushed them under his sandaled foot.
Then he headed back inside and down the short flight of stairs to his apartment; remembering, of course, to shut the fire door behind him.
“One more, before bed,” he said, passing into the lounge and moving towards the drinks cabinet.
He treated himself to a large one, an expensive one. With two ice cubes.

A dream I had last night…

“I’m looking at a scene. A quiet scene. Everything is quiet.
It’s a hotel lobby and my view is trained on the closed lift doors. These doors take up the centre of the lobby.
I guess it must be early in the morning. A night porter shuffles bags and a trolley. The man on the reception desk is almost drifting off to sleep, yet the lighting is not subdued. People may come and go all night. That’s their prerogative.
My position is filmic. I am like the camera, the floating ghost, observing the scene passively. My view rotates, eight feet above the ground.
A couple enters the building through revolving doors. I feel like I am in an elegant hotel - perhaps in Paris or London in the 1950s. The couple laugh between each other. The man holds his woman very close to him. They wear clothes (overcoats) to protect them from the wind and rain, yet they appear dry. It will not be raining now, perhaps it threatened earlier?
Nobody in the scene has noticed the lift’s arrow is counting down the floors to Ground, but I am somewhat aware.
‘Bing’ - the bell signifies the lift’s arrival and the doors slide open. A man in a trench-coat steps from the lift. His eyes are wild, he carries a shotgun which he is pumping.
Nobody reacts quickly to the situation. I hear the first shot fired and my position moves from observation to action. I swoop into the body of the young male in that happy couple, the man with the raincoat. And I feel the shotgun blast hitting me from just a few feet away.
Perhaps it is the extraordinary surprise of being thrown into the action so suddenly, but I seem to feel the huge force of the explosion, the heat and the pain (at least some of it).
Slammed hard into my chest, I am physically moved by the blast and I see the ceiling of the lobby thrown into view.
Time passes now in slow motion, I think it has done ever since the first shot was fired.
I’m soaring on a cushion of air and I am aware of the woman who accompanies me (she is my young wife) and can tell that her mouth is hanging open, in anticipation of the fall.
Confusion reigns, for her. Which noise, which impact came first?
As my head crashes headlong into the clean marble floor, my point of view switches to the night-porter and I am feeling the blast smashing into my chest yet again.
In all I am shot three times. The animosity then fades as darkness seduces.”

Night Terror

Always, Jim would try to hold on.
Sometimes he'd be outside of himself, running down the hill underneath the fly-over. He could see hands grasping, white and twitching and his own head trying to peep over the parapet: the concrete and seashell composite wall, the thick crash barrier.
And as he strained with all his might to force himself, by sheer intensity of will, to almost psychically power more strength into the weary arms of the Jim on the wall, he would always trip and stumble forward. He would then roll, roll, roll down the hill until his head collided and burst against the concrete wall; a wall that had saved many a motorist from plunging into the cold river, far below.
As soon as Jim's vision faded, as soon as a veil was drawn across the eyes of the self that had careered head-first towards a blunt head-trauma, he would be there inside the other body. Switched and slipping from the other side of the skull-splattered crash barrier, looking alternately at feeble fingers and whirling waters.
Inevitably, he'd cry out and fall with that sickness – remember the first drop of your first roller-coaster ride – and, as in dreams of this kind, panic overtakes his body long before it reaches whatever awaits below.
And there wakes Jim, in a dark room, in a soaking bed, still clawing at the covers for any handhold that might have saved him.
He starts to relax. After a few moments, at least, he is calm again. Jim lies flat on his back, his body feels so heavy. He notices his fiancé stirring beside him.
She rolls over onto her side, she is used to his nightmares now.
There comes, then, a scratching. A small noise, of tapping, perhaps, like the claws of a rat. Then comes creaking. It is the floorboards on the landing outside; they always creak like that.
The scritching is louder now, close to the bedroom door. It sounds as if something is slithering along, or is being dragged across rough carpet. The floorboards creak again, and then so does the door.
It's time to sit up; to get up and investigate. But Jim can't move his arm to prop himself up, and no amount of forceful instruction from his brain is causing his leg muscles to so much as twitch. The only part of his body that seems to be engaged is his optic nerve and the muscles which allow the movement of his eye.
The door is open fully. Jim can see more of the room now that his eyes have adjusted to both its darkness and its hints of light. Something is shuffling, scraping and pawing at the foot of his bed. He can hear it, it is breathing. A horrible, rasping whine like its lungs are thick with mucus.
Paroxysms of terror, apoplexy, catatonia.
Jim is so gripped as a form as strange and shapeless as the cloak of night hauls itself upon his useless legs. The darkness has hair and drags itself across his body with a weight that crushes Jim, like he's sinking deep into the bed.
Then hands push upon his face and his neck. The thing is propped upright, its full weight bearing down upon his chest.
How can he breath, how can his heart beat with this burden upon him?
Strange wisps of hair pass away and hints of a face are revealed. Repulsive, shredded, hanging; repellent in every way, all Jim's senses are straining against this creature.
And it just stays there, on his chest, sapping his strength, rising his panic. He can't quite believe this has happened again. How long now, before it ends? 'Til his body is his own once more?
His eyes flick, so wide with desperation, across to his fiancé, across for salvation. She is sleeping, so placidly, so peacefully, as always.
Oh, and how he hated her then.

-----

To black stump - Part IV

I don’t realise it yet, but I’m camping near to black stump.
Every day I have wandered this landscape, almost unchanging, and each evening I have come to a spot within about half a mile of black stump.
On the second day I was walking slowly. Sipping my water, not really looking where I was going. Just thinking about my lot. My life’s direction, my eternal soul.
On the third day I was stumbling about. My skin was drying, even blistering. I was dabbing the water onto my lips now. The billabongs all stagnant, the creeks almost empty. But I was in a reverie and I was obsessing about the infinite. At one point I sat down on the broken carpet of this sacred land, crossed my legs and lifted both hands up in praise to the immense sky. After a few seconds its magnitude bore down on me so hard that I toppled backwards and had to cower before it. I covered myself for fully ten minutes until the concentration of the sun on one part of my body began to scorch.
Each night I have slept near to the embers of my fire and dreamt deep of black stump. Perhaps the smoking remains of the burning twigs and branches felt a kinship with their brother, that black corpse of a tree, that charnel stump? Whatever, some magic pulled me away and each night it began the same.
I was lifted, carried almost, from my slumber and I floated with the wisping smoke trails, across the shapeless desert towards black stump. Always towards black stump.
From the ground, the stump was easily lost among the myriad scrambled residue of the Outback. But, from the air, it was easy to see.
Each morning, the start of my dream or my memory of it would jump and skip about, like a cherished record the needle could barely read. On the first day, for example, I recall no descent to the stump - I would simply have appeared there. Then, yesterday I found I had fallen (or been dropped) upon the ground nearby and needed to pick myself up from the dust and walk on a little.
During my first night’s slumber I met my-ex, Pattie, at black stump. It may be a little strange, but I was quite unsurprised to see her there. I was pleased, and immediately inquired after her and her family. Our conversation was polite, always polite.
I noticed she wore little, but a white robe. Her hair was more golden than the blonde I had known and her face seemed to shine. She was an angelic vision and eventually I found myself unable to speak, so captivated was I by her form.
She said I must speak to her, I must continue to search. Her face began to shimmer and glow white, at this. She asked why I came to black stump, why did I call her here? I tried to speak, but it was as if my tongue had grown wings and flown for the moon.
The longer I failed to speak, the more she was transfigured. Her robes sparkled and her skin was bathed in the glow of absolute purity. When I could see nothing but the fizzing whiteness of her open soul, my mouth engaged and words spat forth: “This is how I’ve always seen you.”
As the light receded so did my dream. I was then allowed to wake and remember.
On the second night it was my mother who was waiting for me there, at the blasted stump. Her eyes shone green and her black hair dropped in glossy flows about her shoulders. Her pursed lips were cherry red. She seemed some way between the benevolent Madonna and the blaspheming witch. I was cautious, though she bade me sit.
Questions raced through my head, things I thought I should know. About her, about me, about my father. They had all seemed so important, so fundamental to my life, to how it had turned out, to how it had reached this moment.
But as we sat and eyed each other from our seated positions, I realised there was nothing to ask my mother. There was nothing I needed to know.
In a moment of a dream, my head was dissolved of a lifetime of ponderings, recriminations and insecurities. Fat tears rolled down my cheeks and my mother opened her mouth to sing. From deep within her came a rich baritone, singing in a dead language. A powerful theme with notes slow and long, rising and falling gently like the soft undulations of the landscape about.
After a minute or so of song, she rose straight up from black stump. A graceful ascension into the night sky, the rumble of her voice echoing in the distant hills, and then… awake.
And so to tonight, the night I find black stump.
My dream tonight began quite differently, because it began by being awoken. A tap on the shoulder brought me from my body. I was standing, looking down on my sleeping form. No flight to black stump upon the smoke of my campfire tonight. I could walk.
A man, a tribesman, a stereotype of my mind, perhaps; with long clumped hair, a loincloth, a painted body and a stick or spear waited for me. He led me on a path, which curved like the S of a perfect snake, between five ironbark trees. Trees, somehow managing a hint of life and sustenance in a harsh world.
At the end of the path was black stump. He pointed and I understood. He put words, ideas, images into my mind. He offered me something that night, he suggested it was sanctuary.
I saw a picture there, inside my head. In the image I stepped upon the sacred stump. I understood that this stump was all that remained of a cursed man, turned into a tree and struck repeatedly by the wrath of heaven, until it was sated.
The charred tree and I were then joined. Fresh bark grew up from the stump and new roots flowed down from my feet. I would soon be encased in this new life. An ironbark eucalyptus tree, grown anew in the wilderness.
It was a wonderful sight. Such light and joy in the midst of a desert. But I never needed a moment more to consider his offer. Instead I bowed to the man, turned slowly and retraced my steps back to where my body slept.
Now, I’m almost there. All that remains for me to do is wake myself and recall the route. The route to my journey’s end. The route to black stump.

...to be continued...

The pull of the tide

Flowing very softly, like the trickling of melting butter, the tide came in around their feet.
They were sleeping, naked on the warm secluded sands, Stefan and Magda - each dreaming of the other.
In Stefan’s dream, Magda was a ghost. She came to him as he turned out the last light in his house. She was brilliant white, with mouth aflame. She reached out to him and he stood his ground for her touch. She kissed him and the flames spread across his body in waves.
In Magda’s dream, Stefan was a cruel master to her. She worked hard for his care, but whenever she displayed the weakness one has when they can’t help but reveal their love, he would attack her with words so barbed, she felt each syllable snagging on her heart.
Magda, mercifully, woke first. Her hands shook and her eyes were grey. She looked at the beautiful body of Stefan, almost glowing like an angel in the midday sun, but he was tainted now. Magda wanted so much to wake and hold him, for this all to go away, but the power of the dream still gripped her. So she just sat up, pulled her legs into her chest and sobbed into her knees.
Though they were inches from each other, their minds reeled, whole universes apart. Stefan’s dream was bringing him such joy, his body had no wish to escape the sensation. The spirit of Magda flowed through his entire being and his veins pumped with vitality.
And then, above the slowly melting tide came the first of the white water, the first gush that signals the world has turned and the tranquillity of the beach must be reclaimed.
As it splashed this fresher, colder water across Magda’s calves, the nagging grip of her dream was broken. She looked at the frothing waters and opened her legs, to allow the next wave to surge through her.
The wave broke, fizzing across their bodies, and Magda leaned her head back into the surf, her hair dabbling in the foam. This last sea wash woke Stefan with a splutter and a cry.
He looked at his lover in confusion, but she smiled sweetly at him in return and stroked his wet face. Then she pulled herself on top of him and kissed him as the surge crashed into her back.
They made love there, in the tidal waters, fighting a valiant last stand against the inevitable. They strained with every inch of their beings for these seconds on their sand and their beach, before the tide came.

-----

There's more love, longing and sand in this tale: On the beaches, far away.

Hronocsh passes

Floating on mithril rivers, above shadow throwing star-hung peaks, the Hronocsh rides.
A cosmic semblance of the dreams spat out into dark spaces between worlds; the jetsom of the universe, reformed and given life, Hronocsh returns to make its dreamers tremble.
Hear it hare along the ancient byways of the air, until the stagnant castles of dead, cratered worlds groan again with fear of re-destruction.
Slicing over cliff-grey moons and singing lullabies to super-novae, the entity is growing.
He comes nearby, near enough to throw a crown to him, every fourteenth century of the Earth’s time. During this desolate hour the virgin cries of a billion children are lost to the agony of the Hronocsh as he siphons their inert souls before conception.
He descends through the soul regions into the spirit clouds, where he drinks astral projections from the creases in the sky.
Next, he will slide lower - ever pulsing, a form in flux - convolving upon the merry dreams and terrors of thought and sleep. A body is almost visible at this time. Gaze upon his reflection in a still lake, from a water’s shore, at the third hour of the new day.
Squint your eyes, squint like you’re peering at the noon sun, and there, glowering like a rotted whale you will spy the wasting Hronocsh sifting through every reflection, every impulse that has come to pass since his last tarriance on our Earthly shores.
Then, within the hour, his wake will pass. A golden wash across the blackness followed by the stain of loss and the monotonous drumbeat of time.
Hronocsh has shimmered on.