WEEK 60
A MOMENT OF SPECULATION
He looked up at the sky. It was steel blue. The falling rain made the sky seem more alive, more dangerous. “If I could fly,” he thought to himself.
He closed his eyes against the pelt of the rain. His lids were so tight that he saw white shapes in the blackness.
“It smells like old damp clothes. I can taste the retch.” He held his right hand out and turned his palm upward. The heavy drops of rain danced and dove off his fingers. “It feels like music. Or the myth about lemmings.”
His eyes still closed, he took a step forward. He slid his foot on the concrete to the edge of the curb. He listened, straining his neck and head into the lane. “I can hear the whisper of emptiness.”
A line of water streaked across his forehead. Sweat and rain. “I could just open my eyes. If I just opened my eyes…I would see. If I could see, then why would I be afraid?” He kept them tight.
He willed his leg to move. His left foot stepped fully onto the road. He heard the scrape of gravel. “I don’t know,” he thought. “It just feels unknown, like when I was a child and the lights were off and the house was silent.”
There was a sound. He craned his neck. “Wait. Is that near or far? Is that an engine?” It sounded like a motorcycle. Not a motorcycle, a car engine. Standing in the street, hands at his side, he began shaking.
“Just open your eyes! That’s all you have to do!” His face was now drenched. “OPEN!” he thought.
His thought trailed off. “Why won’t you open? I can hear the engine, it’s getting closer.”
It came to him like a buoy surfacing in the water. “I’m dreaming.” And then, “I wonder … if I die in my dream, will I die for real?”
He heard the sound of screeching breaks and shrieking tires. “It feels like death.”
END
Let me start by saying that I’ve been fascinated with the idea of writing about dreams and how they might intersect with reality. I remember someone telling me when I was a boy that if you died in you’re your dream, you really died. It’s been one of the little myths I’ve carried with me. You have those, I know you do. I’ve also always been fascinated with the conscious/subconscious thingy and how they intersect and collide. More on all of this in the future.
So, what about you? What’s your thing about conscious vs subconscious? What did you think about this piece? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!
MY thing? I think the unconscious moves the conscious far more than any of us know.
Here are my favorite parts of this piece:
“I hear the whisper of emptiness.”
and
“… then why would I be afraid?”
Why, indeed?
Good bloody question, mate.
-e
I don’t think you’d really die if you had a dream of dying. But since dreams are a way of dealing with reality you might want to to try and figure out why death is mixed up in your sense of the outer world.
I don’t think you’d really die if you had a dream of dying. But since dreams are a way of dealing with reality you might want to to try and figure out why death is mixed up in your sense of the outer world.
+1