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Dream Wait Change |
It doesn't feel very much like a dream. I'm looking at my left index
finger, and I can see the small white oval. For years (five? ten?) I had a
wart there, to one side of the pad. It was relatively large. It never
changed and never grew, but it was resilient enough to resist one round of
liquid nitrogen. It didn't really impede my dexterity, so I lived with it
for all that time. I don't know why, for it was rather ugly. Finally,
though, I'd had enough, and I had it frozen off. Once it was removed, I was
concerned that it would recur: I could still feel a small bump under the
skin. But I was told that the wart had been killed. Apparently it was, for
now it's many years since, and no wart. I can still see the little white
oval, but the wart is quite gone. I look at that finger now and try to
remember feeling the wart, living with the wart. It was a part of me for a
third of my life, but now, even when I concentrate, when I remember the past
so clearly that I can visualize my finger as it was then, I cannot feel what
it was like to have it. It was a legitimate part of me, and now it's
completely gone; and yet I'm no less me than I was then.
Why am I thinking about this now? Usually I like to do things I can't
do when I'm awake: fly, play baseball again, have sex with girls I've never
seen, try convince myself that this time it isn't a dream but that I'm
really in another place. But now isn't like that.
I'm looking out this window, at the sky. The sky is gray, with pinkish
sunset clouds that seem to have a slightly metallic lining. That smoke from
a factory many miles away looks absolutely artificial: its constant
shape-change seems so obviously prefabricated. This window isn't here, and
if I just lean forward I'll fall the six storeys to the sidewalk. Sure,
it'll be scary, but so is jumping into a cold pool. You jump, and it's hard
for a moment, maybe a certain kind of painful; but then you're simply in a
different state of being, and you're a little amused at the way you felt
just before you jumped. The next day you're on the diving board, and even
though you remember how silly it was to be so scared, to have that dread of
going from the warm air into the cool water, even though you remember that
you just jump and that's it, no big deal, it's still hard to make yourself
do it. That's the strange thing: the psyche's innate resistance to changes
of state.
I can't seem to get myself to see any pictures. I feel the dream
landscape is there, just beyond my grasp, beneath the surface of my
perceptions, or outside of them, or in-between, somewhere; but I can't get
to it. I keep looking out of the corners of my eyes, expecting to finally
catch a glimpse of something absurd, something so utterly unrealistic and
impossible that it can't be reality. Then I'll see it and accept it and be
secure in the fact that I'm in that other place in my mind, and finally I
can get on with flying or living out scenarios which I never imagined and
have nothing to do with but that seem perfectly natural to me in spite of
myself. I can see people I haven't thought about for over a decade and walk
through changes of scene that defy logic without having the consciousness to
comprehend what's impossible about them; or I can be covered in warts and
shiver as I scratch them off (which will be surprisingly painless), then
find myself late for class and missing my test, now unable to graduate
because I miscalculated the number of units I needed.
I remember a line from "The Wasteland":
'What shall we do to-morrow? / What shall we ever do?'
I will wear away the hours, just as I am now, waiting for the dream to
start, or for the dreaming to take on its proper shape and spectre.
copyright 2004
Greggory
Moore |
