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Jan. 9th, 2017 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonflower77each of the two dreams would come at a point where he finds a resolution for a major internal conflict connected to his relationship with azila. the first would signify that he is not, after all, chasing a phantom of his wife, whom azila resembles in terms of appearance and several prominent personality traits. the second would reflect the dawning realization that he is suicidal, and that this is bound to have repercussions for azila - he is drowning and, whether he wants to do so or not, he is pulling her down along with himself (one of the reasons being, once again, her similarity to sunim, as well as her sheer presence at his side). it was this darker undercurrent to their relationship that mbuta had sensed from the start. the full understanding of the situation would hit only after he is fatally injured, but the dream would indicate that it has begun to take shape inside.
dream number one:
he is in their base town at night, or so he thinks. objectively, it looks quite different; he can't see the sea shimmering in the distance under the lamps on the piers and can feel none of the salty, sharp scent, and the streets in his town do not wind uphill in the same fashion, nor are the houses situated quite like these. everything is subtly changed, warped, somehow wrong - but a low voice inside him whispers that he is not mistaken and this is, in fact, home (it'd be hard to tell whether it's the strange that has started to seem familiar, or it's the familiar that has, all of a sudden, started to reek of otherness). there may be a nod to the rue d'auseil from h.p. lovecraft's "the music of erich zann" - the street initran walks along may be particularly steep, shaded from the moonlight by towering houses that seem to be leaning toward each other, connected here and there by small overhead bridges.
there is nobody in sight. the further, the more he finds it strange to be wandering through those narrow streets and not meeting a single human (or, for that matter, semi-human) being. the inhabitants seem to have died out or just vanished, dissolved like the evening mist. he gradually starts to feel stranded in the middle of nowhere, in a vacuum outside of familiar time and space.
dark water is standing or flowing quietly through the streets, and there is a dull, indistinct silver shine on its surface. his uniform pants are soaked, his boots are full of water and his feet feel like weights, which makes it harder to walk. he wonders for a moment or two whether he should take the boots off and shake out the water, or, better still, tie the laces together, swing them over his shoulder and go barefoot, but decides against this. the thought of removing any of his clothes out there in the open causes an intense discomfort, even a vague fear. he feels he would be left more vulnerable, exposed - though to what, he cannot quite tell. this appears to apply to his footwear in particular; he is unsettled and sick at the stomach at the thought of what might be swimming through that water and all but brushing against his feet at that very moment.
there is a sense of the water is rising, not visibly, but in his mind there is a persistent image of it reaching his knees, then his waist and, finally, his chin, until he has to stand on tiptoe and strain with whatever strength he has to get that one gulp of air, just before he is submerged completely and suffocates. the image keeps recurring, growing more and more vivid each time, until he is convinced that this is exactly what is going to happen. in a more figurative sense, he is being flooded by emotions he can no longer control, drowning in his own grief.
he is aware that he is searching for someone, a female, but he is not sure who she might be. deep down, he knows; and, of course, we know as well, but he is unable to articulate this even to himself. the more he tries to imagine the woman's face, the more it blurs, so that he is unable to discern the features.
the street widens and he finds himself in what might be a town square, or some other open space. in the middle there stands a building that looks like a decrepit storage shed or warehouse and invokes certain literary images - dostoyevski's eternity seen as a “bath-house with spiders in the corners” or bulgakov's cross between a log cabin and an outhouse, embedded in a lifeless, cardboard landscape. in other words, hell, domesticated somewhat, though not that much, and condensed in a several dozen cubic meters. am not sure whether the building would be large or small – the size itself may seem impossible to discern - but in either case i see it as nondescript, gray, shabby-looking on the outside, with an old, dark tin roof (not necessarily rusty, but dull and scratched).
the square is illuminated with little cylindrical lights mounted on dark poles sticking straight out of the water. the lights themselves could be white; the poles, black. their height may vary, but i think they would be rather short, not quite reaching his knees perhaps. on an odd impulse, he squats in the water and touches the smooth concave glass that shields one of the integrated lamps, trying to take a closer look at the small halogen bulb inside. now he is wet to the waist, but does not notice. two parallel rows of lights lead to the entrance, and some more are scattered in semi-circles around the building. each glows either a bright white or a dim orange, which is doubled below by the reflection on the dark water.
initran steps over the threshold, glad to have found some sort of shelter at last. now there is no danger from the water or the things that might be lurking in there, he thinks. inside, the building looks like ishan and adhra's “lair” of an apartment when it hasn't been cleaned for a few weeks, except it is several times worse. there is complete chaos, with with several filthy old mattresses and dirty canvas sacks containing on-one knows what on the floor, along with unidentified objects that elude coherent description. there is no source of light, no oil lamp, no hearth, not even candles stuck onto various surfaces in utter disorder as ishan would have had them. everything is coated with a thick layer of dust. the room has an uninhabited feel, as if no living being has ventured inside for years. yet there still seem to be faint echoes that seem to be saying “home”, some lingering shreds of warmth and coziness; after all, it's a space with the potential to be used as a residence, one that could become home, with time, or one that used to be, once, long ago. in there, he feels safer than he does outdoors, in the dark, deserted, flooded streets.
the fact that it is dry inside is relieving on a very concrete physical level. he finally rolls up his pants, takes off his wet boots and leaves them at the doorstep, marking that strange no-man’s-or-woman’s territory as his home.
some time passes - perhaps two minutes, or perhaps ten, and initran becomes aware with a start of a rapidly mounting anxiety. at first, he is unsure sure what it is about, but, upon some reflection, he is able to formulate it to himself: it is a fear of his “self” being eroded, dissolving without trace (as i was writing this golding’s “dissolved like a lump of salt in water” came to mind; that does not seem to be coincidental either). it is not unlike the fear of death, but, in a sense, it is even worse, deeper, welling from the core of his being. he senses that the dissolution has already begun, and, if the person he has been waiting for fails to arrive and he remains in there much longer, he will cease to exist.
he paces around the room, tries to lie down on one of the mattresses or to sit on its corner, but this does not make him feel any better. in fact, the longer he stays there, the more the anxiety becomes connected to that particular room; it is as if the walls themselves were draining his life and his sense of "self" from him. worst of all, he doesn't know or is unable to remember the face of the woman he is waiting for; he thinks, how am i going to recognize her? the harder he tries to imagine her features, the more unclear and indistinct they become, and he finds himself on the brink of a panic attack.
then he notices a small window he hadn't seen before, which may have just appeared, as in usual in dreams. from the outside, the building had seemed windowless, and he is certain there had been no windows several minutes - or hours or aeons - ago, as he was pacing around the room feeling trapped. he peers out. he sees the dark water in the street and the orange or white lights scattered here and there. it is as quiet and deserted as ever; nothing seems to have changed, but he is suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that someone is coming, he is about to see them right then and there, that instant. he knows that this will be the female significant other he's been waiting for, and, in a matter of seconds, he will finally find out who she is.
he wakes up with a hangover, which is one of the better things that have been happening to him, and finds himself staring right into a pair of shining yellow circles. as he watches, they make a sharp movement to the side, leaving uneven tracers in the dark; azila has sensed that he has awakened and that the dream had been far from pleasant, and responded with one of those sudden, swift head turns.
i could imagine her showing concern in her own way, by telling him in a seemingly flat voice that he had lain for a very long time on the mat, motionless, with his eyes closed. as a biologist, she knows humans are supposed to sleep like that, and she remembers this from the life she led once upon a time, when she went by another name, but something inside her still stirs at the sight and tells her to be concerned. she would be a lot likely to stand or sit up, even during her equivalent of sleep when her mind goes “offline”, and would lie down and stretch out only when she was gravely wounded and could no longer get up. then that meaningful long stare. you are as i was on the roof that night. are you not? and then deeper, beyond the words she cannot find, unspeakable, immense – what can i do for you? because indeed, what could one conceivably do? if she noticed an intruder, she would fight them or haul them out, but what is she supposed to do here? where is the intruder?
he may simply re-affirm with her that she remembers, that she knows this is how non-altered humans sleep. but on another level, of course, he senses, he knows; he is aware that she is right.
after a while, something makes him rise on his elbow and gaze at azila. he wants to take a closer look at her, to examine her, though he cannot quite explain why. he feels a growing certainty, as if something has just settled inside him, a muddled sediment sinking to the bottom and leaving the waters still and clear - no, not a conscious thought, not yet, the time hasn't come, and he is far too exhausted and hungover, but he feels more at ease with himself than he has been for weeks. in a little while, he drifts into a deep sleep without dreams.
aaron has also suggested that right after he has the dream, he may gaze at a photographic portrait of sunim, and, in a near-hallucinatory moment, see her features overlapping with azila's - the dark brown skin and eyes are hers, but the eyes suddenly look slanted, with little wrinkles around the corners, the pupils are slitted and horizontal, and the lower part of the face becomes covered in chitinous scales. the next moment, he shakes the hallucination off, but when he tries to think of his wife, he finds himself thinking about azila.
dream number two:
he is spinning, head over heels, in utter darkness. a better word would be “blackness” - the sort of total dark where you strive to see something and can't, no matter how hard you try, and then you start to see shapes in a while, glowing dots, lines, contours of nonexistent objects, entire designs that start to materialize and dance in front of your eyes, because your mind insists that there *has* to be something in there.
the motion is eerily slow and makes him dizzy, disoriented, sick at the stomach. every once in a while, his back or shoulder is slammed hard into what seems to be the walls of an enormous metal container (there might be an actual physiological reason behind the back/shoulder pain - it's possible that he fought someone previous rescue operation and was run into a wall or flung onto the ground, which gave him some serious bruises).
he has no control over the movement. tumbling over one’s head while floating in a weightless environment would come closest, i suppose, but he occasionally feels suspended in a void by an unseen force, which is directing his movement to make him hit the metal walls. there is something thoroughly frightening about it – the fact thet he is utterly out of control, helpless, at the mercy of something unnameable for which he has no word or concept.
when i discussed this with my friend, she described the sensation as being tumbled inside a washer-dryer, like clothes would be, except it would be cold and not hot inside. she also said that the nature of the motion – being held and tossed as if by some external force – had not occurred to her before, but now that she had given it some thought, it seems to have a significance of its own and is about as uncanny as would be necessary, under the circumstances.
he wakes up to an odd, worrying tension. to some this sort of dream might not even qualify as a nightmare, but i would be extremely concerned if i saw one. it suggests that something is seriously wrong - that, in some fundamental sense, one is losing control over the trajectory of one's life, over one's own choices and where they may lead one at the end of the day.
once he sees azila standing in the distance as usual, guarding his sleep, he feels better and starts to calm down. something clicks back inside him and the world slowly begins to come back to normal, or whatever would qualify as such him in this condition. even azila’s outline, dark against the thin light filtering through the semi-open blinds, is soothing to see. he recounts his reckless behavior over the recent weeks and realizes, with a sudden clarity, that he wants to die and that he has been seeking situations where the wish might become a reality, and repeats to himself again: no, i cannot afford that. i have entered into a commitment, and i must keep my promise to her no matter what, because she has chosen to stay here for my sake and it's been killing her. i have to survive, if not for myself, then for her. i must (the magic word “must” - unfortunately, sometimes just not magic enough to sustain you).
i'm not sure about the period of time between this dream and his death, but it should come toward the end - at the most a couple of months, at the least a couple of weeks.
dream number one:
he is in their base town at night, or so he thinks. objectively, it looks quite different; he can't see the sea shimmering in the distance under the lamps on the piers and can feel none of the salty, sharp scent, and the streets in his town do not wind uphill in the same fashion, nor are the houses situated quite like these. everything is subtly changed, warped, somehow wrong - but a low voice inside him whispers that he is not mistaken and this is, in fact, home (it'd be hard to tell whether it's the strange that has started to seem familiar, or it's the familiar that has, all of a sudden, started to reek of otherness). there may be a nod to the rue d'auseil from h.p. lovecraft's "the music of erich zann" - the street initran walks along may be particularly steep, shaded from the moonlight by towering houses that seem to be leaning toward each other, connected here and there by small overhead bridges.
there is nobody in sight. the further, the more he finds it strange to be wandering through those narrow streets and not meeting a single human (or, for that matter, semi-human) being. the inhabitants seem to have died out or just vanished, dissolved like the evening mist. he gradually starts to feel stranded in the middle of nowhere, in a vacuum outside of familiar time and space.
dark water is standing or flowing quietly through the streets, and there is a dull, indistinct silver shine on its surface. his uniform pants are soaked, his boots are full of water and his feet feel like weights, which makes it harder to walk. he wonders for a moment or two whether he should take the boots off and shake out the water, or, better still, tie the laces together, swing them over his shoulder and go barefoot, but decides against this. the thought of removing any of his clothes out there in the open causes an intense discomfort, even a vague fear. he feels he would be left more vulnerable, exposed - though to what, he cannot quite tell. this appears to apply to his footwear in particular; he is unsettled and sick at the stomach at the thought of what might be swimming through that water and all but brushing against his feet at that very moment.
there is a sense of the water is rising, not visibly, but in his mind there is a persistent image of it reaching his knees, then his waist and, finally, his chin, until he has to stand on tiptoe and strain with whatever strength he has to get that one gulp of air, just before he is submerged completely and suffocates. the image keeps recurring, growing more and more vivid each time, until he is convinced that this is exactly what is going to happen. in a more figurative sense, he is being flooded by emotions he can no longer control, drowning in his own grief.
he is aware that he is searching for someone, a female, but he is not sure who she might be. deep down, he knows; and, of course, we know as well, but he is unable to articulate this even to himself. the more he tries to imagine the woman's face, the more it blurs, so that he is unable to discern the features.
the street widens and he finds himself in what might be a town square, or some other open space. in the middle there stands a building that looks like a decrepit storage shed or warehouse and invokes certain literary images - dostoyevski's eternity seen as a “bath-house with spiders in the corners” or bulgakov's cross between a log cabin and an outhouse, embedded in a lifeless, cardboard landscape. in other words, hell, domesticated somewhat, though not that much, and condensed in a several dozen cubic meters. am not sure whether the building would be large or small – the size itself may seem impossible to discern - but in either case i see it as nondescript, gray, shabby-looking on the outside, with an old, dark tin roof (not necessarily rusty, but dull and scratched).
the square is illuminated with little cylindrical lights mounted on dark poles sticking straight out of the water. the lights themselves could be white; the poles, black. their height may vary, but i think they would be rather short, not quite reaching his knees perhaps. on an odd impulse, he squats in the water and touches the smooth concave glass that shields one of the integrated lamps, trying to take a closer look at the small halogen bulb inside. now he is wet to the waist, but does not notice. two parallel rows of lights lead to the entrance, and some more are scattered in semi-circles around the building. each glows either a bright white or a dim orange, which is doubled below by the reflection on the dark water.
initran steps over the threshold, glad to have found some sort of shelter at last. now there is no danger from the water or the things that might be lurking in there, he thinks. inside, the building looks like ishan and adhra's “lair” of an apartment when it hasn't been cleaned for a few weeks, except it is several times worse. there is complete chaos, with with several filthy old mattresses and dirty canvas sacks containing on-one knows what on the floor, along with unidentified objects that elude coherent description. there is no source of light, no oil lamp, no hearth, not even candles stuck onto various surfaces in utter disorder as ishan would have had them. everything is coated with a thick layer of dust. the room has an uninhabited feel, as if no living being has ventured inside for years. yet there still seem to be faint echoes that seem to be saying “home”, some lingering shreds of warmth and coziness; after all, it's a space with the potential to be used as a residence, one that could become home, with time, or one that used to be, once, long ago. in there, he feels safer than he does outdoors, in the dark, deserted, flooded streets.
the fact that it is dry inside is relieving on a very concrete physical level. he finally rolls up his pants, takes off his wet boots and leaves them at the doorstep, marking that strange no-man’s-or-woman’s territory as his home.
some time passes - perhaps two minutes, or perhaps ten, and initran becomes aware with a start of a rapidly mounting anxiety. at first, he is unsure sure what it is about, but, upon some reflection, he is able to formulate it to himself: it is a fear of his “self” being eroded, dissolving without trace (as i was writing this golding’s “dissolved like a lump of salt in water” came to mind; that does not seem to be coincidental either). it is not unlike the fear of death, but, in a sense, it is even worse, deeper, welling from the core of his being. he senses that the dissolution has already begun, and, if the person he has been waiting for fails to arrive and he remains in there much longer, he will cease to exist.
he paces around the room, tries to lie down on one of the mattresses or to sit on its corner, but this does not make him feel any better. in fact, the longer he stays there, the more the anxiety becomes connected to that particular room; it is as if the walls themselves were draining his life and his sense of "self" from him. worst of all, he doesn't know or is unable to remember the face of the woman he is waiting for; he thinks, how am i going to recognize her? the harder he tries to imagine her features, the more unclear and indistinct they become, and he finds himself on the brink of a panic attack.
then he notices a small window he hadn't seen before, which may have just appeared, as in usual in dreams. from the outside, the building had seemed windowless, and he is certain there had been no windows several minutes - or hours or aeons - ago, as he was pacing around the room feeling trapped. he peers out. he sees the dark water in the street and the orange or white lights scattered here and there. it is as quiet and deserted as ever; nothing seems to have changed, but he is suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that someone is coming, he is about to see them right then and there, that instant. he knows that this will be the female significant other he's been waiting for, and, in a matter of seconds, he will finally find out who she is.
he wakes up with a hangover, which is one of the better things that have been happening to him, and finds himself staring right into a pair of shining yellow circles. as he watches, they make a sharp movement to the side, leaving uneven tracers in the dark; azila has sensed that he has awakened and that the dream had been far from pleasant, and responded with one of those sudden, swift head turns.
i could imagine her showing concern in her own way, by telling him in a seemingly flat voice that he had lain for a very long time on the mat, motionless, with his eyes closed. as a biologist, she knows humans are supposed to sleep like that, and she remembers this from the life she led once upon a time, when she went by another name, but something inside her still stirs at the sight and tells her to be concerned. she would be a lot likely to stand or sit up, even during her equivalent of sleep when her mind goes “offline”, and would lie down and stretch out only when she was gravely wounded and could no longer get up. then that meaningful long stare. you are as i was on the roof that night. are you not? and then deeper, beyond the words she cannot find, unspeakable, immense – what can i do for you? because indeed, what could one conceivably do? if she noticed an intruder, she would fight them or haul them out, but what is she supposed to do here? where is the intruder?
he may simply re-affirm with her that she remembers, that she knows this is how non-altered humans sleep. but on another level, of course, he senses, he knows; he is aware that she is right.
after a while, something makes him rise on his elbow and gaze at azila. he wants to take a closer look at her, to examine her, though he cannot quite explain why. he feels a growing certainty, as if something has just settled inside him, a muddled sediment sinking to the bottom and leaving the waters still and clear - no, not a conscious thought, not yet, the time hasn't come, and he is far too exhausted and hungover, but he feels more at ease with himself than he has been for weeks. in a little while, he drifts into a deep sleep without dreams.
aaron has also suggested that right after he has the dream, he may gaze at a photographic portrait of sunim, and, in a near-hallucinatory moment, see her features overlapping with azila's - the dark brown skin and eyes are hers, but the eyes suddenly look slanted, with little wrinkles around the corners, the pupils are slitted and horizontal, and the lower part of the face becomes covered in chitinous scales. the next moment, he shakes the hallucination off, but when he tries to think of his wife, he finds himself thinking about azila.
dream number two:
he is spinning, head over heels, in utter darkness. a better word would be “blackness” - the sort of total dark where you strive to see something and can't, no matter how hard you try, and then you start to see shapes in a while, glowing dots, lines, contours of nonexistent objects, entire designs that start to materialize and dance in front of your eyes, because your mind insists that there *has* to be something in there.
the motion is eerily slow and makes him dizzy, disoriented, sick at the stomach. every once in a while, his back or shoulder is slammed hard into what seems to be the walls of an enormous metal container (there might be an actual physiological reason behind the back/shoulder pain - it's possible that he fought someone previous rescue operation and was run into a wall or flung onto the ground, which gave him some serious bruises).
he has no control over the movement. tumbling over one’s head while floating in a weightless environment would come closest, i suppose, but he occasionally feels suspended in a void by an unseen force, which is directing his movement to make him hit the metal walls. there is something thoroughly frightening about it – the fact thet he is utterly out of control, helpless, at the mercy of something unnameable for which he has no word or concept.
when i discussed this with my friend, she described the sensation as being tumbled inside a washer-dryer, like clothes would be, except it would be cold and not hot inside. she also said that the nature of the motion – being held and tossed as if by some external force – had not occurred to her before, but now that she had given it some thought, it seems to have a significance of its own and is about as uncanny as would be necessary, under the circumstances.
he wakes up to an odd, worrying tension. to some this sort of dream might not even qualify as a nightmare, but i would be extremely concerned if i saw one. it suggests that something is seriously wrong - that, in some fundamental sense, one is losing control over the trajectory of one's life, over one's own choices and where they may lead one at the end of the day.
once he sees azila standing in the distance as usual, guarding his sleep, he feels better and starts to calm down. something clicks back inside him and the world slowly begins to come back to normal, or whatever would qualify as such him in this condition. even azila’s outline, dark against the thin light filtering through the semi-open blinds, is soothing to see. he recounts his reckless behavior over the recent weeks and realizes, with a sudden clarity, that he wants to die and that he has been seeking situations where the wish might become a reality, and repeats to himself again: no, i cannot afford that. i have entered into a commitment, and i must keep my promise to her no matter what, because she has chosen to stay here for my sake and it's been killing her. i have to survive, if not for myself, then for her. i must (the magic word “must” - unfortunately, sometimes just not magic enough to sustain you).
i'm not sure about the period of time between this dream and his death, but it should come toward the end - at the most a couple of months, at the least a couple of weeks.