Speaking of dreams, last night I had a nice vivid dream, one of those long ones that seem like they are different dreams woven together. It found myself on a field by a muddy slope down towards a stream. It’s one of those local streams that have no real names, but everyone just call it The Stream. I was not alone; a former friend I haven’t seen in many years was there with me. He was doing something down in the water, maybe digging for clams or trying to capture the small freshwater fish not yet killed by some oil spill with his hands. I look up at the sky, dark clouds coming in from the west. “It looks like we’ll get rain”, I tell him, but I don’t think he hears, he’s caught up in the mud digging.
After a while, he turns to me and vomits out a flat uninterested “what?” I tell him it looks like we’ll get rain or something. A cold breeze comes in from the west, northwest to be precise, and embraces us, rattling the browning leafs in the trees growing in the swampy vicinity of the stream. “Yeah, yeah”, he says, “we’ll get going soon enough, nothing to worry about.” He has a camera around his neck, one of those old analogue ones. History. This scenario smells like 1995.
Eventually he tires of whatever he’s doing, photographing earthworms in the wet mud, maybe, and we get on two bikes. It doesn’t look like the bike I used to have, it’s blue and red, a paradoxical political intercourse; and we pedal across the field and across the dirt road by the school that leads up to the old military ammunitions storage they downsized some ten years ago. As we cross the school yard and I encounter a peculiar notion of nostalgia, a vague memory from long ago, it begins to snow from the darkening skies. It’s not cold at all, it’s warm, summer time, yet from the sky the purest snow ever, white like virginity, and it doesn’t melt as it hits the ground, it lands like volcanic ash, and our bikes leave a trail.
We take the path through the woods, it does not look like it does in reality; it isn’t paved and it passes on a narrow ledge above a marsh full of tropical-looking ferns, highly odd looking for this region in reality. But it is a dream, so I do not reflect on this, I merely absorb the feeling in the air, a notion on unreality, a strangeness and relief of being not-me ever-present in my dreams. We come out of the forest, and follow a narrow road up to a large house.
I guess you might say it looks like something out of a bad horror movie; it’s Dreams In The Witch-house, and this is the witch-house in Arkham; the walls weathered and in demand or urgent attention, but none has cared for many years. He hands me a camera, my former friend, says something I don’t register and walks up to the door. I follow, insecurely – or maybe that is just my real perception of what I would have done were it not a dream? – and we walk up a set of stairs that lead to a door inside the house; apparently it is arranged with partitions, i.e. a block of flats. An old lady opens- my maternal grandmother, strangely- though in this dream she is my former friends’ mother, nothing else. “It’s coming!” she says, “It’s coming to town! Let’s get up on the roof!” And on the roof the view is spectacular, despite the chilling rain that has now replaced the volcanic-ash-snow, and despite (or because of?) the horrific thunder and the flashes of lightning, purple and orange, white and blue, green and yellow. It’s raining immensely, and the wind has picked up, it’s hard to see for my hair gets in my eyes. “There it is!” she screams, and amongst the buildings towards the city – which looks strangely Japanese, must be my weeaboo traits playing a trick on me – I can see it, a tornado.
It’s a grey funnel that now reaches down from the clouds, and we hear the noises it makes as it shatters windows and entire buildings down in the valley; it seems we are on a ridge of sort, which looks nothing like anything I’ve seen in real life. The cityscape is not that of my usual City-of-Dreams, either. “What if it comes this way?” my former friend asks my maternal grandmother-gone-his-mother, “shouldn’t we try to find someplace more secure to hold out? Why do we stand on the roof?” And his mother tells him that the view is the best from up here. “What about the security risk?” And she says with great certainty that it will not hurt us, that it knows “respect”.
“Capture it”, my former friend says as we are riding a boat down a narrow channel by small wooden houses surrounded with lush greenery. I hold a camera and I can see the tornado sweeping through distant neighbourhoods through its zoom lens. I click a few times, capture a few pictures.
Suddenly, we are surrounded by ruins. Everywhere caved in homes and pulverised concrete, here and there still standing structures, partially collapsed homes, a burning school; it’s still raining, and it seems to be turning towards night. A dead body floats in the waterway behind us.
I am alone in the little boat. It looks like a kayak of sorts. I drift along a beach in the darkness, it’s still a bit windy and every now and the salty ocean spray come into my mouth. And I feel depressed; drifting alone along a shoreline lined with abandoned and collapsed hotels. But at the same time, it is a strong moment, the kind of moment when you take a deep breath and reflect upon how awesome the surroundings really are. Then there was something about a library, and then I woke up smiling, so glad I had a dream–