~ dream diary

I travel in a Brobdingnagian ark of Theatre from an ancient time; housing a enormous troupe of the Comedia dell’arte – or something of a similar period. Huge chambers, decrepit, creaking, filled with slaving technicians and hunched actors. A script appears, very thick, filled with images and useful background material. It is a work by Shakespeare. It has been prepared by Lynne Ellis, who is the director of this vast concern. A huge drawbridge is lowered, opening the cavernous hold of the ark to a dim, windy climate. Workers begin to spew forth.

I overhear a discussion. Talk of Three Judges, who preside over the troupe’s product. I hear Lynne. Things are going to change, she says. From now on, it is the Director who has final say. No ‘Judges’ are going to stand in the way of her artistic verdicts …

*

Neville, a neighbour from my childhood, is living in a farmhouse near a cool river stained with tannin, the edges choked with tangled blackberries. I am living nearby. I never see Neville, though I know he is there, in a weatherboard house built upon the side of the river valley. He is isolated and bad-tempered.

At night I wander the edges of his property, following lines of stones in the grass. I see a light in the window, which each night seems dimmer. I worry for him. He is fading. I travel nearer the house, but he does not notice. The layout of the grounds is similar to that of my first school in Mt Waverley, Holy Family.

Then, at last, there is no light. I sense that Neville’s spirit has ebbed to near nothing. I call Robert, who, it seems, is Neville’s brother. Robert comes to the river. We speak of gunpowder and dynamite. He tells me that the walls of Neville’s house – which are now of brick – were pumped full of black powder at the time of construction…

I shudder, remembering that I had swum down the river with a stick of dynamite between my teeth, fetching it like a dog from where it had been thrown among the blackberries. I imagine it detonating in my mouth …

There seems to be a chance that Neville’s house will detonate too. We run. We come to a railway station in the open fields – slabs of white concrete bordering the rails, nothing more. It is my favourite railway station in the world.

I run and run. Faster and for longer than I have ever run before. I worry that my body will not hold. I am following Robert down the single rail track, among the gentle hills and greenish yellow farmlands …

Soon, we are following the sandy bed of a dried out creek. The banks are sheer and ten feet high, edged by thick tangles of blackberries. Robert slows. He has encountered a large, disarticulated kangaroo. He looks up. there are two expectant faces peering over the bank. A man and his son. Robert inspects the dismembered animal and scowls. Parts are badly decayed, yet somehow it lives. He warns it in a gentle voice, as he begins to rip the section with the forearms from the section with the head …

I am appalled. I retreat some metres back down the creek bed, looking for another break in the wall of blackberries. Having found one, I use my surprising physical prowess to leap sufficiently high to scale it. I see the open fields. I follow the creek towards the man and his boy. They are farmers. They are deeply interested in sheep. They wish to be indistinguishable from sheep. The man is leaning over the bank, speaking with Robert. He is bedecked with sheep fur … and sheep parts … now the kangaroo in the creek bed is also a sheep. The pair are eager for it and Robert is making a deal … The boy is intensely suspicious of me; he regards me with an evil stare. I am fascinated by his ears. They are elven and edged with ribbons of sheep skin. Elsewhere on his body he wears the hooves and ears and genitalia of sheep …

*

I had these dreams last night. Strange how a particular night will be filled with fantastic visions, when most are barren. Perhaps it because the house is at peace. Jenny is happier than she has been in a long while and, of course, Polly is following suit …

I’m sure my anti-depressives play a part too. Prozac and Zoloft, I have found, tend to be generators of wild dreams.

Curiously, within my dreams I sometimes recall other dreams which I had forgotten. Landscapes and atmospheres recur. In those paramnesic moments between wakefulness and sleep, while I struggle to remember what I have seen, sometimes a completely different dream will come to mind, one that had left my mind completely …

Railton, the tiny town in Tasmania where my mother grew up, transferred into the wilderness and stifling heat of mainland Australia. The region, once fertile is utterly bereft of life. A thick carpet of soft dust has settled on everything. I feel a deep existential horror of this dust; it is choking and poisonous. It is the dust of long ages and utter neglect. I have seen it in vacuum cleaner bags and in derelict houses that have been closed for decades. It hides sharp objects that if stepped upon can penetrate the toughest of soles… If you push down into it, your fingers may pass through ripe decaying flesh …

It is not the light, fertile dust of nature; it is an unnatural dust, a product of humanity, the remains of our works eroded by time. It has settled upon Railton, where a few hunched grey individuals still live, for want of choice.

I come to the fence of a horse paddock where a girl is standing. She is excited to see someone from the outside world. I explain that I have comer with my mother to revisit her birth place … The girl indicates a kind of barrow or roadside shop … It is disused and covered with dust; there is nothing for sale, nor has there been in living memory. it speaks of a time when there was still life in this place. I find in it an almost infinite melancholy …

This nightmare dust recurs in other dreams too. In a dream Melbourne, which has a wholly different layout to reality. A layout which remains similar, but is built on by each successive dream. There is a suburb of derelict workers’ cottages close to a rail line, bordering the central city. Here I sometimes explore, in abandoned rooms suffocated by the slow rain of dust…