The Dream of Despair

When I was little, I used to have dreams which repeated themselves. I thought of them as the same dream, but in a rather hazy sense: the setting, the storyline (if I may call the succession of sensory images which composes dreams so), the ending - all changed. Still, in some sense I inhabited the same world, revisited the same themes, felt the same emotions and sensory states. 

Of these recurrent dreams, this was probably the most poignant one.

I am in a pearly white landscape extending in all directions. I am as clean and at peace as the landscape: the crystal whiteness is both within and outside me, filling me with a light that is at exactly the same level as the one outside. This is boundlessness: I don't know if in power, but surely in satisfaction and peace. There is no desire here, nothing but a pale glow of star-like joy. 

And then suddenly it all goes wrong.

The landscape was a paper leaf left unwritten; now it's scrunched up and torn apart and inked black and viciously stabbed and cut, as if someone was drawing messy, scrambled lines all over the paper (isn't it funny that, to talk of dreams - the purest of metaphors - we have the need still to lay a further layer of metaphors so as to be able to transmit them to others?). There is no one to be seem doing it. There is a hollow scream throughout the air, and suddenly people running everywhere, buildings collapsed, limbs and blood and fear made solid in an earthquake.

Fear, hate, loss, grief, despair. I am sure there will never be anything further, anything else. This is what the world has become, both inside and outside: there is no hope because there is nowhere to escape to.

I no longer dream, or at least I almost never remember my dreams. Reality seems to have grown much less transparent; it's presented in a block of certainties, not as a veil of possibilities. The white sheet of that world can, in clear-skied, clear-eyed days, be seen floating over the river.