Two Dreams

The café was expansive and constrictive at the same time. We were huddled around a table that seemed like it flowed into the table behind us and to the table in front of us and to all sides without break, though zároveň we were in our own pine box, the five of us. I think we were five. Shane, Raun, two others, and I sat at this table that flowed into other tables yet was at the same time separated from other tables by yawning precipices. A group of strangers, all women, sat secretly eavesdropping on us from either the yawning distance of the table behind us or from the table behind us that flowed effortlessly into our own table. These creatures - and I believe they were all women - had youthful bodies topped with ancient faces. Well, not all of them were ancient, but they were all more mature than warranted. They all bore the marks that age performs upon us all as we gradually move from youthfulness to decrepitude, though in differing degrees. Some faces were even ghastly - hags’ heads atop nubile torsos.

Raun - and by this point in the morning I am pretty sure it was Raun - announced to the rest of us that we were to create our own community from scratch - from the schematic of the bucket, as it were, or from the bare and splintered wooden planks of the pine box - because it was the assured method that our unique identity as a collection could stamp itself upon the wax that seals the scroll of our age, or at least upon the wax that seals the pine box of our togetherness. I came back with yes, even bands sometimes have their own communities or somesuch in the insipid manner that I sometimes don’t catch myself at in enough time to stop myself from doing it. Shane then commented yeah - some undeservingly so in the weary, sort of jaded way that many of us viewed the world around us during the bright, fecund, creative yet at times emotionally bleak epoch of College Station.

The group of youthful crones then suddenly turned to us and remarked on how it would be impossible for them to communicate with us since they could not relate to what we were speaking about. But why would this be? Their pine box was surely the same sort of pine box that our togetherness resided in. Were the wax seals on each of them simply too thick to be broken, or even to let a flow of thoughts and ideologies inwards and outwards?

The next day, or perhaps the next epoch, we returned to the café. We were only two and we passed the group of eavesdroppers on the way. They were joined by a few male counterparts and situated in an observation bunker similar to those that were on the Berlin Wall back in the “good ol days”. Immediately upon entering the café, a waiter-thing bid us sit at a table. This table was at the most 30 centimeters in diameter. He (or it) sat a pot of coffee directly onto the table.

I was in a vast library with Loyal. We were wandering through the stacks within oubliette flavored spaces full of colorful and colorless cafés. Faceless people stood, sat and milled everywhere. He informed me that apparently the building was also a prison. A new gaggle of inmates had been brought in who were worth taking a look at. I suppose a portion of the library’s entertainment section was a human zoo. And, as every entity knows, when a new gaggle is brought into a zoo, it is certainly celebration time. So we set out in search of the section in which we could do just that. Celebration == observing humans locked in cages, apparently, according to whatever module was in charge of my subconscious at the time.

At some point during our circuitous journey, I lost Loyal. I was alone in the vast. I was also nowhere near any zoo-like edifice. I descended a staircase or it may have been an escalator or doorless lift. Music was coursing over tables, chairs, and patrons poised statically with coffee and teacups in their statuesque, fingered appendages. It was music I knew. In fact, it was Seasons End by Marillion, but sung by a strange female voice in a modified register, warped and vocoded. The remnants of the instrumentation were reduced to muzak.

I finally found Loyal. He was walking out of a ballroom to my right with his head tilted and a smirk on his face. His hair was tied into the copek he often wore. He encouraged me once more to find the new gaggle of inmates - to go view them. I followed his advice and wandered once again into the vast. Perhaps like Black House, this library in my mind was practically infinite.

Finally, I was in a long corridor that had cage upon cage on its right side, all housing different animals. No human was in sight, however, besides perhaps myself, much less a gaggle of them. I had assumed that the gaggle of new inmates would be of the human variety. Was I incorrect? I kept walking.

Structures on my left had formed into fences connected at right angles covered with vines, much like the grape vines that grew behind the house during my youth or those that grew behind my grandfather (on my father’s side)’s house. A creature then leaped up from the right on to the top of these vineyards, apparently either to attack or to play with another creature atop the structure. I realized then that the prisoners were loose and I had to flee. So that I did. I retreated along the same path whence I’d come. The only notable encounter on the way “out” was with a youthful black bear who pawed at me playfully.