lucid

NON DREAM DREAM LUCID DREAM
I am walking up the stairs, trying not to make too much sound, my shoes hard against the hard wooden floor, as if they might fear that I’m a prowler. It’s the house of my auntie, Chris (perhaps triggered by the lengthy conversation with my mum last night about Chris and Oma and Luke) – the original house from childhood visits - and I’ve just arrived in Holland. Coming up the stairs onto the first floor, the door is open, so I’m planning on going into the first room opposite the stairs without stirring anyone, but when the bed comes into view, there is a soft pre-dawn light filtering through transparent curtains, and my cousin Luke is going down on his girlfriend, she wearing nothing but a green t-shirt (perhaps a reference to my favourite colour at Induction Day at Amnesty yesterday)... They see me almost immediately, reacting surprised, the girl gesturing with some embarrassment that my room is upstairs, as I also try and save the situation, like I don’t want to interrupt I only need to know where I’m sleeping and I’ll be as quick as gone. In the next room, where I expect to find Chris, there is again movement under the blanket, and multiple heads stick out surprised, with at least three couples all surprised to see me.

Upstairs in the dark, spacious attic like a small community hall with hard wooden floor, there are lots of people who are familiar to me as the friends me and Luke used to hang with when we were all younger, and starting with Luke, I give them all big powerful hugs, crushing them close for a brief passionate hug in the excitement, although physically they all resemble closer the dark long-haired, Latino faces of More’s friends we used to hang with in Cusco, or in Plaza Dorego in Buenos Aires, and I suppose thusly, a gringo, a friend of a friend, I’m more excited to see them again as they are of me. They’re all coming to visit at the same time, and next I remember that a band, modelled physically on the consummate rock star faces of The Church (in mid-December 2010 they played at my last shift working at Notes), singing 90's grunge music, the singer almost resembling a thinner version of old Peter Fonda (from the Californication episode a few days back on late Sunday night), playing a low-strapped electric Stratocaster, in the middle of the room without needing to set up.

At the drinks table, a guy who is in his late 30’s, a musician type, recognises me as the guest of honour, asks me to crack his back, and I don’t need too much instruction before I hold him firmly with my left hand on his shoulder and with my other hand cupped inside his left shoulder blade push it forward with a sinewy pop that seems to relieve him. He then tests out how much looser his shoulder feels, softly but still quite rigidly assuming a drummer’s stance and playing a simple beat on the air. There’s another veteran of the rock scene, tall and strong and a bald head, dressed sharp and all black, and, in the obliged manner as if the gig and their being present were contractual, he pours me a drink as if for a competition winner. He and the drummer talk about how tough musicians have it, continuing without irony even as I tell them that they’re lucky, they get to make a living out of playing music.

*

In another scene, I am downstairs, outside in a small narrow courtyard on the side of the house, and one of the girls across from me talks about how they have this thing they do, and I realise that there’s a guy that has already scaled the two tiers of sloping tiled rooves.

He is standing on the edge of the roof, if only for the rush of adrenaline, when he suddenly snaps backward violently as if slipping, and very quickly slides on his back down the first tier of slick, concave terracotta tiles, bouncing down onto the second shorter tier, when we all stand, reacting to break his mortal fall, but without significant resistance caused by any one of us, he somehow slows, turning on the lip of the roof and, cart wheeling smoothly in the air, lands gracefully on his feet.


In a subsequent scene, I move naturally through the liquid surface of a horizontal, rectangular mirror set at eye-level on the wall, coming out again in the darkened back of what resembles a garage and move to the front, with the big barn-like door open and strong sunlight coming in through the gaps in the roof as if it were made up of long sticks bound together, or lots of big holes in the jungle leaf roofing.

I notice a strange looking child next to my leg, who seems to be alone (perhaps like the toddler in the stroller alone outside the general store along Glebe Point Road yesterday, staring expressionlessly down the street) and I stoop to it, perhaps to ask where her mother is. The ugly, fat baby, standing up wobbling with arms outstretched, not physically older than 2 years old, talks to me, although in a squeaky voice, perfectly, like talking to a much older kid. Loose, pock-marked skin, becomes mice ears the next time I look (like my pet rat when I was in my teens who developed a tumour and lost all of its hair)...

Holding it in my hands, I put it down to let it free as an over-grown bald and wrinkly mouse, that resembles the skin and deformation of a person with an ageing disorder. I think about it again (perhaps based on my background thinking lately to more regularly question to the logic of what I’m experiencing, and exercise my memory like whether I can remember the steps that lead me to my present location) and suddenly realise that I must be in a dream, immediately holding my nose and when I feel the contradictory wind through my nostrils, I say out loud that I’m dreaming to Simon Patterson who has been with me for sometime now, who I know will be interested in this realisation and follow me in exploring its implications.


Lucid dreaming, I suppress the thought that I might wake up if I get too excited, as well as the thought to write down this breakthrough and document what is happening subsequently (as if learning from the previous attempt – with the differently coloured humus – where I immediately began writing in the excitement, a reaction that I explained to Symo and Ken on last Friday night as being stupid, saying that ‘I totally missed the point’), and have no trouble focusing on trying to change the scene with my mind, focusing specifically on the mirror which we have been passing through. I see the people in the courtyard on the other side, but now the conceit doesn’t function, and the mirror changes from a realistic inanimate object into never existing in the first place, an empty black frame built into the wall. I had assumed that my sub-conscious was still active, and it seems from this evidence that my awakening of conscious awareness in the dream has limited the fanciful potential of my imagination.