He awakens from another dream. His sleep lately is punctuated with dreams. They are small climaxes. It is like this:
He falls asleep at the foot of a wave and the dream begins soon thereafter. The wave swells and at the crest and froth is a poignant moment. The wave breaks and he wakes. He always wakes. There is no transition between dreams within sleep.
Consciousness is an interlude. He thinks it the part where the audience mill about for a time in the foyer between acts. He is the sole member of the audience.
At times he has a moment within one of these dreams. The wave, then, is a metadream. No, that is not exactly right because it is not a dream within a dream, but a calm within a rising climax. The climaxes always rise. They cannot diminish. He doesn’t know why this is so, but the rule cannot be broken. He is miniature upon the wave’s swell. To him, at this point, it is a calm expanse of water.
His wish, maybe the only real wish, is to wake up from this state. To wake up from tranquility, which is nothing. Perhaps when he was born he had this pleasure. A newborn can wake from nothing at all. Somehow he knows this is not right, though. The foetus has a mind, so it must dream in the womb. All minds dream. He at least knows that.
What does it dream of? Is it of Tuzla or Wellington? Is it of Gweek? Again, he is unsure. He doesn’t think so. Say the mother mused aloud about places she’d been during her interminable pregnancy. Well, musing wouldn’t be enough. Say the impressions of these events are passed into the infant’s mind.
He had a theory that a monther’s consciousness could pass to the foetus. Yes, impressions, at least, could congeal there. Dreams in the womb would be taken from these impressions. They could be a collage or mishmash. A jumble of images make up an aleatoric slideshow. Some more thought can be given to this, he thinks. He’s in one of his intermissions. He is walking around in the foyer thinking about the previous act.
It was about dreaming. Dreaming in the womb.
Without the experience of moving through space, a foetus couldn’t know anything about time, either. Bobbing in amneotic sac may have a sort of rhythm. It could count its heartbeats. It’d have little notions of numbers, but could manage by setting at first a random impression provided by its mother to each heartbeat. Eventually those images would repeat.
A cycle forms and the impressions have taken on meaning. The sequence is the first idea of time. It must be jarring, he thinks, when the infant is thrust forth into a world with a different conception of time altogether. He laughs. It’s the first sound he’s made since awakening and it startles him. Perhaps that infant is scarred for life by the disparity between perception of time in the womb and the perception forced on it upon entrance into our world.
In his groggy state, it seems plausible.
It is also disturbing, and brings him back to his thoughts on awakening from nothing. From tranquility. Another question is whether the foetus is even awake at all during its bobbing journey. Periods between sleep and waking are periods of the utmost lucidity. Threads from both worlds combine in this purgatory. Perhaps the transition is much slower in the foetoid state. But before the impressions or even noticing a heartbeat, a dawn of actual consciousness must occur and that is the awakening from nothingness.
He wants to experience that again.
He speculates whether he was an in vitro child. In this case, no impressions would pass between another being and himself until the birthing. His drop into our world was the waking from nothing. No concept of time existed before and therefore no trauma could result.
This state of purity is an argument he’ll have to make later at work with any clientele who’ll listen. An argument for a sort of artificial conception. He smiles and his pillow moulds the shape of his cheek. Foam is pliant much like his clientele. They hold the shape of his words whilst in conversation, and especially whilst in drink, then leave and drift back into their original shape.
His dream had been about Tuzla. He was in the midst of moving back there into the same flat he vacated years before. A few people were with him, straggling behind as he entered the space. One had probably been Shambal. Usually, it’s Shambal. The strands holding him from this world to the other had mostly snapped already, however, and the others are now unknowns.
He’d opened his refrigerator. It was packed full of jugs of orange liquid. He’d supposed, in the dream, as he still supposes now, that they were a type of artificial drink, representing displacement and its falseness. The jugs were the same that milk comes in. Milk in the United States. He hates the United States. He did in the dream, also. He wondered why the tenant between him and him again never bothered to replace anything.
The flat was one room, but a corridor opened immediately after the fridge, range and counter. It proceeded to the left, opening slightly, continuing and becoming another space altogether. He believes that in the dream, he was both surprised and not surprised at the same time. He expected it but found it unnerving. Shambal had disappeared.
The corridor walked him forward from bare plaster and concrete to carpeted hallway. He espied, in the distance, in the tunnel-like dimness, in the tube-like constriction, a red sofa. Light bathed it and the low table in front of it. Bent rivulets of steam crawled up the air from two mugs. He knew they contained green tea. He desperately wanted to drink.
The girl stared at him as he approached. Her eyes seemed closer, but receded into her head the closer he came. Her dark bangs brushed her eyes and her pink lips did not part. Her nostrils flared, taking in the smell of the tea. She was waiting for him to drink. She desperately wanted a drink.
He wondered then about constriction - not exactly of the tube’s constriction, but about constriction in general. It puzzled him the thought of the dream and his near opposite manner of living. In Tuzla, as now, he’d had a self-imposed constricted space. He’d needed lovingly clinging spaces for as long as he remembers.
The flat in Tuzla from a childhood he never actually experienced had only one true exit. One apparent exit. Two ways out onto opposite balconies only led to a plummet. Well, those, too, could be an exit of sorts. The only real exit was the doorway safely into the hallway. This new portal in the dream, and from the flat, illustrates a new direction in life. Afraid as he is, he may pierce the bubble and travel through the tube towards unknown destinations.
During the dream, he approached the girl. He knew she was betrothed. He may even have been the lucky one. He knows, however, that no matter how much importance the universe around him seems to place on human bonding, it overrated. He smiles again. The pillow complies.
The girl played incessantly with the ring on the middle finger of her left hand. She didn’t look down at it. She just twisted and twisted with her right hand. When she spoke, her mouth opened and seemed to become all of her face. He saw into the depths of her hollow gut through her jittering oesophogas.
Nataša, he whispers as his smile fades. He’s falling again into sleep.
