A long empty corridor, up from a hole in a lake, down into a hill, slowly winding to a shore. The dream set is something like that. My footsteps, my slow low breaths, my plodding heart make the only sounds. It is very dark, I can’t make the framed objects hanging on the wall, but they remind me that I’m still a married father, that I, too, am framed by memory. I know they’re close, Jan and Brendan, sleeping on either side of me in oblivion; their shapes press against the walls as I walk. I press my hands against that surface and feel the cool presence of them, dreaming of me walking on the sward of a sidhe, singing their names. The hall turns and twists, never reaching any juncture or decisive turn, like a snake or a river or an artery or a bowel. Or an umbilicus. History rages on silently above. I sense powers and principalities at war on the surface, the deeply laid cable of my mind recording binary bursts and flashes, the pressure-wake of salvoes reaching down this far, bllllllsure-wake of salvoes reaching down this far, blood raining on the surface, the shapes of ships and men slowly plummeting down from above, all to be woven, like strands, into the coax hemp which looms down my spine. I walk on. The darkness is black and yet blue, silvery, ghostly, stirred by my steps, as if I, the dream’s unearthly protagonist, were a Photographer’s hand, the monkey who stirs the Master’s emulsion. Something will come into focus at some end of this hall. I will rise from this bath, my soul’s image saturated with red light while it sets in a visage of clarity. A son of the new day. My eyes open and I lay here in this drifting coracle of a bed at the shore of the world in the dead of all nights, hours from any solace of dawn. There is no place like home, there is no place like home, there metaphoric presence. What’s left of them are now loosely gathered and tossed covers, the rubbish of waking, sweat-stained winding sheets for one life which I must rise from and leave behind, like a fish from its sea, and walk down the shore which could be a deeper bed for all I know, or a road, or simply an bar where all eternity comes to drink. A coin ahead on those sands, washed in from the sea, my dream’s doubloon, glinting, winking only for a moment before being hauled back by a wave, gone by the time Iis no place like home: does Dorothy rouse back in History like a witch fallen from Heaven? No trace of Jan or Brendan in the sheets as I get up, they have already swum down from any tactile sheets as I get up, they have already swum down from any tactile get here, yawning, scratching my balls, rummaging up: coffee, pen and paper, a strand leading back to that dark cable which barrows this tale.
