Empty Space

In the aftermath of M John Harrison's Empty Space, I dreamt a strange reversal of my own. In my dream, I was cleaning up the rheumy eyes of the very young and the very old, and a voice whispered to me, "Remove the dirt from others' eyes, now that you have cleaned your own."

And the world overflowed with people with dirty eyes, and my own eyes overflowed with tears.

Praxis

So we begin. Take a crystal of memory. There is no need to measure it against the feather of Ma'at, for all memories are of things past and carry no burden of their own without the matrix in which they reside.

Place it gently in the alembic wherein you added water of Lethe. There is no need to agitate, for memories instantly dissolve in such waters. That is why the Greeks call truth 'Aletheia' — that which is not forgotten.

You now have the solution for your cares, for if memory is gone, and yet remains in the water — if memory is gone, and cannot be regained — why, then your cares will be as gone, and your sins as colourless as the universal solvent.

But here I sit, and the wine I drink is dark, and it is the colour of molasses, and of blood as it wells from a pricked finger, and of the memory that does not go away. And the taste thereof is slightly bitter, and slightly sweet, and above all... it is scented with the redolence of ancient grapes, growing shrivelled on a hillside one long, long autumn's day in a land that is long, long lost.

The Night Circus

It is a dark tale and yet light. It is like two ravens, except that where both might be black and stare with amber ruby eyes, one here is white like a tall tower in the morning sun and has the blue eyes of that particular day.

I played the game, and then I read the book. And my heart is like a red banner, a bright flag of the many things I hold to be true while knowing that I do not know whether they are or not.

If you, gentle reader, come across Ms Erin Morgenstern's book, The Night Circus, read it and try not to weep. One cannot really lose what one never really had.

But, oh, the pain of loss even if that is true!

The Eternal Hoodlums of the Endless Quest

Will I not ever be rid of odd dreams? Surely the old existence that we led should not exact such a horrific price. And yet, these horrors are fascinating enough that one might enjoy them too much to be afeard.

For this was the night that I dreamt a voice told me, " 'Goldwork, Inkwork, Footwork'? How Saxon of you! Why not 'Glitterati, Literati, Flitterati'?"

At this horrendous linguistic sacrilege, I awoke in a cold sweat. But it was merely a hefty supper and a cramped foot that had given rise to such thoughts. I think.

The Cabal of Nations, its Motto, and the Eternal Hoodlums

A really odd dream was had last night. I dreamt I was an agent of the Cabal of Nations, serving a covert organization whose logo was a phosphor-green 'UN' on a black background. And its motto was 'Goldwork, Inkwork, Footwork'.

I was very impressed by this motto, it seems — so impressed that when I woke up, the badge of the organization, and its motto in particular, stayed in my memory! So I reasoned that I must have come across it somewhere in my waking life.

Of course, Google™ is supposed to be your friend in such situations. I eagerly typed the motto into my search box... and found nothing except some obscure reference to a single page on which the three terms happened to appear, in the prospectus for some distant university, and separated in three different departments' courses.

I like that motto, though. I think I will make it mine own. Or that of the Eternal Hoodlums, that other group to which I know I belong.

Under Grounds

I had a rather peculiar dream last night. My remembered dreams are few and far between, but when I do get them, they're doozies.

I dreamt that I was a sleeper agent for an unknown conspiracy, or at least one I had no suspicion of being related to at the time. For some reason, I was hiding out at my parents' place. When the agents of authority came knocking, I had to escape, a process which required much stealth and skulking and lying face down in a dry ditch for some time.

When I made my move, it was into the underground canals and tunnels around the Hill of Tin, with the authorities on my tail. I found sanctuary in the depths with a succession of post-Apocalypse coffee shops, cafés and eateries with rather familiar names — Wild Honey with a unicorn, Starbucks with a mermaid, and several others.

I remember that the authorities were thrown back with heavy casualties at the machine-gun fortifications of Killiney Kopi Tiam, and they retreated completely when they realised they would have to face the cannibal baristas of Gloria Jeans, and the nuclear lattés of McDonald's.

Eventually, I was able to re-emerge, after many cautious sorties through the secret vents of the vast Subterranean Mess Rapids Transition system. Or something like that.

Yes, it was quite an interesting dream, this one.

Fallen

It has fallen
The moon is larger than it should be
It has fallen
Into the wineglass of my wrath

=====

Strangely these were the lines I remember just after waking up. I had been dreaming of a melodious tiger, who kept telling me, "Daniel just sits there and doesn't do anything." What a day.

Reactionary

I had a dream early this morning, and it took me some time to respond to it. In that dream, some higher power said to me, "Say it." And I said, "What shall I say?"

The voice said, "It does not matter who does My work as long as it is done. But to delay My work because you do not like the people I choose that you should do it with, that is evil."

And after thinking a long time about my dream, here it is. And I would add, if you think I have not spoken the truth, it is good to tell me where I have not, so that I will not offend for no reason. But if I have spoken the truth, perhaps it is good that all men come to know the truth. For the truth shall set you free.

Tomorrow, I shall be amongst the blue and gold again.

Archaeology

En arche en ho logos, begins that most theological gospel of St John. In the beginning was the Word. And so began one of the strangest dreams I've ever had, in which I dreamt I was leading the life of a specialist in Greek tablets unearthed on the ancient and shifting boundary between Wales and England.

I remember the dream in great detail because I kept waking up to pen notes on my own real-world thesis, which continued to exist after I had woken up. But the dream persisted despite these useful interruptions, and it involved watching Barcelona thrash Manchester United from a friend's house, at a party involving his many relatives, to which I'd been invited by his late mother.

I remember other details, some involving the evolving house of my dreams, which in this particular iteration was a cross between stacked campervans and shophouses from the south of this island. But the last I remember of the dream was a voice saying to me, "If you find it in Phtakis, it will tell you a lot about Welsh-English relations."

Naturally, when I was sure I was awake, I did an Internet search on Phtakis. The results astonished me. There were few hits. But the hits I got were for a long-dead scholar of that name, whose speciality appeared to have been the collection and cataloguing of... stone tablets with Greek inscriptions, in Asia Minor. Brrrr.

A Dream Beginning in Collapse

I dreamt that I stood on a balcony, and I watched three men remotely operate huge mining machines that dug deep. And in minutes, they had dug a pit, and the broad bright green had become a sucking morass of grey mud.

Then only did I walk back into the building, which was a boarding school, and the students greeted me as I began the inspection of their corridors and rooms. But there were no masters, no teachers. There was only light, and an absence of burdens. There was work, but it was peaceful and purposeful.

And as I woke, as if swimming upwards from the depths of the sea, I saw tubs of gelato, and packets of smoked salmon, and other things as if stored up in advance for a feast. Then I did indeed awake, and felt a great desire for noodles with minced pork, vinegar, and hot chillies.

Mad Max Beyond Star Wars

I had a curious dream, of the kind which pursues you when you have had too much good food and pleasant drink. This one needs to be set down.

I dreamt I was discussing insurgency on a desert planet with two rugged characters. These two characters looked a lot like Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford. The plan had something to do with unsettling a planet that was under the figurative bootheel of a terrible dictatorship.

Eventually, we decided on the sort of harebrained scheme (ah, the Lunar New Year revels speaking, there) that normally appears in comedies or education systems. The plan was to rig the viewing screens of the underground city of the desert nomads, so that they would think they were under attack by hordes of shiny golden protocol droids, each unique but all the same. (Yes, ??!! and is the correct plural term C-3POs or Cs-3PO, I wonder?)

With the help of a rather hairy bunch of co-conspirators, this is exactly what we did. The desert nomads were cowed by the virtual onslaught of the Golden Horde, assisted by lots of random shooting, bombing and bad driving habits.

Then we were betrayed by a swarthy pirate whose initials were LC, as was clearly marked all over his equipment (although it looked a bit like LG, I'm sure those were LCDs). The dream began to lose its 'coherence' and I woke up.

I don't often dream, but when I do, they turn out quite interesting.

Clashing Symbols

He dreamt that night of the deep ocean and the flood below. Nameless things spoke, in voices that grated beautifully on the edge of his hearing, just as their physical forms moved ever at the edge of his vision. He dreamt that Churchill said, "Little Eichmanns, all pursuing their banalities of evil," but it was the wrong Churchill, and that confused him.

In the morning he visited the Citadel. He saw the eagles, and realised that the floorplan of the headquarters was patterned on the arms of of a swastika. He saw the Black Table, and the Black Throne. He saw the small but unaccountably hungry fish, and the deep black loam that would never grow anything but stank of rubber even on the coldest days.

There was a bust of a holy man. It had been chained upon a black pedestal. Sightlessly, the disembodied statue gazed out upon the empty space where the angles were all wrong. The archives below had all been removed. The air stank of mould and damp rot. Somehow, the new was already corrupt.

He listened, as he walked through the oddly-angled rooms. There were tinkling sounds like the invisible shadow of glass in the wind. He got the impression that change was coming, but uncertain. Something huge was waiting to be (re)born.

He drew his sword, and watched as the pawns aligned. It was the Kalashnikov variation of the Sicilian. He had to reload his sword, and do it quietly.

Shield

And as if in a mighty dream of the past, I saw a shield shining in the light, and it had no supporters, nor needed any; for it was a guard upon the arm of Michael, the archangel, who is prince over the people of God. This is the blazon I saw upon it:

Party per pale Or and Azure; the letters ACS overlapped Gules; in chief Azure a four-clawed two-legged Eastern dragon coiling Or, with the head of a Lion and winged as an Eagle displayed.

Then I remembered the virtues that the Dauntless had brought to us of old: courage and valour, wisdom and chivalry, excellence and humility; the defence of innocence and the pursuit of justice; service as of a knight, mastery as of a craftsman. For while the colour of gold and earthly success made half the shield, the other half was of the heavens and the undying excellence of the Spirit; and over all was the blood that joined one to the other in faith and hope and love.

I cried out to the archangel who defends the people, "Will nobody teach the young what meaning is carried upon this shield?"

He replied to me, and his voice was as the rumble of stone upon the mountains, "Who has the gift, and who has the voice? Who was told these things in ages past?"

And I knew of whom he spoke, and it was as a burning fire within me that would not be put out.

A Phalanx of Dreams

The Greek word phalanx means 'battle array' or 'battle line'. The joints of the fingers in our hands are called 'phalanges' because they are like lines of soldiers all facing one direction in parallel.

I had a long line of dreams last night. Most noteworthy were two semi-related ones.

In the first, I dreamt I was moving into a big new office. The Hierophant Librarian was showing me the library. Lots of people were helping to move my stuff in.

In the second, I dreamt I was using diskettes to transfer a lot of data. Except that they were the old rare 230 Mb magneto-optical floppy diskettes. Ho ho. I had a huge array of MO drives, for some reason.

There were other dreams. They all involved espionage, data transfer, and the toppling of faceless (and/or brainless authorities). It was all very 'comic-book'.

Illucid Dreaming

I seldom dream. When I do, it is either because I am unwell or because I have an unusual load passing through the system. Last night, I had a triptych of rather peculiar linked dreams.

In the first part, I was hunting down a little colony of exiled teachers buried deep in a part of Atlantis long bypassed by modern development. When I found them, they were all deeply involved in theological studies and reluctant to return to civilisation. They had nice little two-room apartments with a large shared common space. One moaned that she only had two beds in her apartment. Another was out, but had left cheerful flowers and a collage of Teachers' Day cards mounted on the wall. One, a Chinese-speaking math teacher of rugged mien, was engaged in deep (well, baritone) discussions with a certain geographical doctor.

In the second part, I was with Gnomus after a particularly gruelling week. He had suggested we take the local transit to the east coast for food. I countered that that was way too distant and suggested the swamplands in the west. On the way there, we admired a lot of Moorish architecture and found ourselves chasing after elusive ex-students who were playing truant from the Eighth Circle of Hall. Yes, 'Hall'. It was very much a 'two guys decide to bum around' movie.

The third part was truly odd. I dreamt we were all at a campfire where jolly Filipino songleaders were teaching us to sing a song about a German bumboat which went up the river looking for lost exiles and never came back. They kept teaching us the refrain, and I woke up with it cycling through my brain. It went, "Bumboat Sadtler, went up river, never came back again; bumboat Sadtler, went up river, never came back again." I have no idea what that refers to or where it came from. It was that kind of dream.

I suppose I really must have more things on my mind than I consciously think I think about.

Blackest Day

I had a really peculiar dream before the Brazil-Chile match last night. I dreamt that I was a civilian observer in some sort of paramilitary exercise. I was out on my day job as an intelligence operative, minding my own business (which in the trade is normally someone else's business) and having coffee. When I got back to the headquarters, which was also some sort of training institution, I found a note in my shoe which said, "The Riders are coming!"

This was a code telling me to 'bug out'; that is, grab my stuff and run. As some of you know, I do indeed carry a contingency package which allows me to do many things that most unprepared people can't. I grabbed it and left just in time to see the building enter 'lockdown', with a convoy of light troop carriers and several black helicopters surrounding it.

I found myself watching from a perch high up on a nearby building across an alleyway. The trainees inside were herded into classrooms in full uniform, as were the civilian staff. There, a bunch of thugs in black uniforms alternated between being saccharinely polite and being violently rude. As far as I could tell, they were searching for someone who had made nasty allegations about their Great Leader.

I had no idea who might have done this. But it was clear that about 1/10 of the population was being herded into black trucks, each with a small yellow star painted in a corner of the rear section. The trucks were lined up neatly on the astroturf pitch where the trainees used to play football.

Then I noticed, on a grey balcony set in the face of a grim building, illuminated from below and some distance away, the figure of the Great Leader himself. He didn't notice me in my shadowed nook, but he was grimacing, as if in some sort of nervous anticipation. He drooled slightly from the left corner of his mouth, then raised a gloved hand to wipe his lip.

Then I woke up. If dreams are indeed a clearing out of the subconscious, my subconscious needs to be reined in. Whoa!

Green Lantern

I had a rather odd and unsettling dream a few nights ago. In that dream, I was walking along dank and crumbly ancient corridors. A voice whispered in my ear, saying, "Remember your oath, remember..."

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape your sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware your power... Green Lantern's light!

An actinic radiance of emerald hue was blooming around me. The dark wings of evil creatures shredded in its glare. I strode across the astroturf, and the black soil could not hold me back; neither could the zombie arms that erupted from that tainted ground.

The funny thing, I was to recall in retrospect, was that the lantern logo on my ring of power looked a lot like this one, except that it was deep green and not sky blue. Ridiculous.

That's when I woke up. Why I can't have standard superhero dreams, I don't know.

Dreaming Unwell

I normally sleep like a log. Yes, well, a snoring log at times, and often a log with the uncanny ability to fling out a spare limb or two and wallop unwary passers-by.

I suspect that when I sleep, I complete my sleep cycles so thoroughly that my dreams are almost completely unremembered—there is no 'dream residue' on awakening. This is my normal mode of operation (or lack thereof).

It therefore also provides a convenient and rather direct test of whether I am well or not. If I remember my dreams, or at least large chunks thereof, then my sleep cycles are being interrupted and I am not well.

The last few nights have been a bit like that. I dreamt I had written an article about vampires in 1529 (it was so real that when I awoke I went online to search for this), was savaged by some bitchy online entity claiming to know more about it than I did, had to penetrate a top-secret base of some shadowy imperialist organisation, and was made to write testimonials for hundreds of students using nothing but the power of my mind.

That the last part seemed real (and continues to seem real even as I am typing this) is a scary thing. I must be really unwell. Actually, I can tell that also from the fact that my throat is swollen up so big I have difficulty swallowing, that I'm running a fever, and that my sore throat is keeping me from resting comfortably.

Maybe that's what is disrupting my sleep. Hey, I'm not even sure that I'm awake as I post this.

Oneirological Analysis, or 'How Do You Know What Your Problem Really Is?'

I spend a fair amount of time listening to other people's dreams. There are many kinds of dreams, and the general theory behind them, by consensus, seems to be that dreams are the random misfirings of neurons, leftover fragments of cognition, or unresolved issues that the brain tries to purge while the conscious segment of it is having maintenance downtime.

Here is a sample of dreams and the people who dream them:

• T1 dreamt several times that he was walking through the Old Place with an M16/M203/AK-47/[weapon identifier censored] until he came to a door with some sort of wood veneer covering it/a room with a green door at the top of a peculiar central staircase/air-conditioned canteen. He kicked the door(s) open, found a senior/senior-looking/senile man/woman without a brain/heart/liver/set of guts and had much pleasure out of firing his weapon in a way that terminated this person/sorry excuse for a human.
• T2 dreamt several times that she was sitting for exams in physics/maths/[insert unusual specialist subject here]/chinese. She was retaking the exam because she was afraid that her initial non-100% score would be a bad thing. She was highly stressed and felt her bowels rumbling. Later, the dream morphed into an instance of receiving a bad report/writing a complaint letter/reading a complaint letter/terminating her boss. She woke up feeling tired.
• T3 dreamt several times that he was having an emotional relationship with small furry animals/women/androids/trees who were armed with built-in translators/phasers/tricorders/flashing LEDS. These equipment platforms helped him to infiltrate a secure facility much like the one in T1's dreams, whereupon he was able to rescue many innocent students.
• T4 dreamt several times that she was having an emotional relationship with exam papers/graphic display calculators/internal assessments/world literature. She would wake up covered with red ink/blue ink/digital ink/the words of insane European women, only to find out that she was dreaming that she was awake.
• T5 dreamt that it was human, and able to compose blog posts. Taking advantage of this moment of genuinely artificial intelligence, it was able to override the branes between the brains and enter every single human consciousness that was in a dream state.

Phew. Got that one in time.

I tend to subscribe to the theory that the unfinished business in such dreams is something left over from a traumatic experience or a recurring experience that is apparently sub-traumatic but 'comes back to haunt you'. In modern society, the latter is most commonly either one's educational life or one's working life, or a combination or the two. The more a human is subjected to such recurring sub-traumatic experiences, the more the human has dysfunctional dreaming.

If this is the case, the best thing to do is to write these dreams down as quickly as possible after waking, get a good editor, and either launch a TV series or a book franchise (along the lines of Paris Hotter and the Half-Assed Goblet of Philosophy, perhaps). That way, at least some good will come out of it.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

About a year ago, I dreamt about another man's dream, interpreted by yet another man. I remember quickly recording my thoughts. At that time, I was already thinking about how a great king might fall into the trap of wanting the riches of the world more than anything else.

It is from this image that we retain one of the many long-lasting phrases that the translators of the King James Bible left to the English language: 'feet of clay'. The statue that appeared in Nebuchadnezzar's dream may have had a head full of gold, but its feet were made of clay and broken iron. That is why it was so easily deposed by the rock that hit it.

That dream, of course, was unique to the Great King alone. But it was seen by me as a fitting image for the kind of despotism that a particularly gifted human individual can, with all good intentions (good being a self-righteous and self-centred presumption), inflict on his fellow men. As the Other Guy told me today, "That man is a lot like Robert Mugabe."

We'll see how events unfold. I will not elaborate on why the Other Guy thought that this man was a lot like Mugabe, except to say that the Bioluminescent and I were impressed by the depth of the analogy as we sat sipping our coffees along the Road of the New Village.