Catching dreams

26 mai 2008

* edited
* second edit, July 8, 2008

As I might have mentioned before, it is excessively rare that my dreams break the seal through sleep toward consciousness; only when their thread is cut clear, as by some golden scissors, when the timer rings again after I fall back asleep. This was the case today. I painfully dragged myself out of bed and pushed the vision back for more urgent matters.
Only tonight the elements of the dream insinuated into my mind drifting on its own, and I recalled it. I was in a forest, an European one. It was all very green, alike the foliage of the trees on my way to the city I noticed having dramatically grown during my three-day leave to the North, but in contrast the weather did not resemble anything I've seen here. The sky was invisible but the crude white light of a moist cloudy day was shedding from between the branches. There was someone with me, a boy, and I felt being younger as well.
On the ground, hardly visible under the luxuriant vegetation, were rail tracks.

'tout ce qui est humain ne m'est étranger'
tu parles de rails, de voies, de codes,
depuis le début j'ai l'impression que tu te refuses à la liberté, que tu culpabilises presque...
pourquoi donc p'tite ?
tu as ta vie devant toute belle, pourquoi tu n'oses pas les choses

We were a bit past the point the railways split toward different directions. In spite of the dense verdure, trains still ran on those tracks, and we only ruefully climbed sideways to avoid one.
Crouched in this metallic delta, my friend suddenly warns me. A wild boar. There's a wild boar half behind that tree, seen through the leaves - and as we both try to seek refuge behind another tree, as my friend succeeds to escape its attention I fail and find myself facing the beast.
It looks much more like a warthog, for its enormous tusks looking much like horns, brilliant and polished, as sharp as blades. The colours are cold, his fur is also clean and dark. There is no doubt, if it rode me down, about how easily the horns would open my flesh, carve the skin of my face and rummage in my entrails. This leaves nothing to imagination.
I seize the horns, the palms of my hand pushing back its slowly increasing pressure.
I don't know how long I'll be able to stand against it.
There is this intense feeling I'm about to be run over and killed, each second bringing me closer to the point. Men come. One has a rifle, arms it, and aims at point-blank range at the boar's head. Everything seems to happen in slow motion.
The hunter shoots. For long seconds after, an eternity, the pressure is the same, nothing happens, I wonder and pray it worked, as if the beast would ignore the wound and ride me down, and still this last-second feeling, the feeling I am about to lose grip. The boar slowly leans on its right while a viscid substance, half black half translucent, leaks out of the hole in its head, and it collapses in the grass.

Somehow, afterwards, my mouth is filled with the black-transparent pitch; it has the consistency of thick engine oil, and no matter how I cough, spit and wipe the pouring filamentous matter, I cannot get rid of it. I repeatedly ask for water.

The elements have been piecing up fast as I walked absent-mindedly from work. It seemed to me the recent exercise to pick out the information in a flow of words vaguely affected my perception. Most aspects of this dream are unusual, as my dreams used to be very direct in a way, emptying all real items and persons from any meaning in themselves and turning them into plain and pure symbols, sterile products of the mind. I rarely perceived that strikingly how everything in visions has origin and direction; the former are clear for most of this one but over the latter remains some mystery. The tracks and the trains I am walking along for hours everyday, crossing with caution the tramway lines out of the pedestrian crossings; I've spent more than half a day in the train no later than last week. I would take the aforementioned unsettling sentence of a loved one about me as metaphorical direction. The boar I've discussed with another friend learning for a Greek mythology exam, and complaining there was so many of these animals in his curriculum he was mixing up all legends. I have some intuition about the origin of half of the substance, but no clue about why, about its destination, what it symbolizes and above all the symbolism of eating the defeated monster's brain - I would bet I haven't talked about that with anyone recently, but I somehow feel it wouldn't be too difficult to find out some evidence in mythology.

And as for the beast's destination - how ironical to be told to literally take it by the horns... (As much as noticing later how genuinely and spontaneously I misused horns for tusks...) Funnily occurring the day after I make this resolution to confront the tasks and do it. There was this hint of guilt as always and calm fear in my child's body. I laughed, on that way back from the city, almost proud, would it be my conscious Self, of how the darkness commanding was now insufflating poetry into the well-known metaphors... Funny also it invests another dimension of speech the day after I proclaim mastering upon words. This is a tilt which will never end, for the better, should I judge. And although it seems a few minutes passed before breaking the dream's resilience and forcing it into schemes and rationality, safer keeping in mind the dream caught us as much as I foolishly think catching it.
There is still a lot of room for choice, would one prefer believing the obvious path is not drawn by one's one hands. Finally, what shall I take by the horns? Or who?

And even months after I saw this dream, and weeks after its story unfolded and light was shed on its significance, elements are still piecing up almost spontaneously - though I suspect it might be present symbolical-liminal reflection as much as genuine recollection. We were a bit past the point the railways split toward different directions. A railroad switch. And I'm randomly roaming across those tracks driving further away from each other.
This is not much grist to the interpretation mill, for what it's worth, but nonetheless revealing.

Posté par Juomi à 19:11 - Commentaires [1] - Rétroliens [0] - Permalien [#]

Commentaires

jurassique

D'après ce que j'ai compris, tu as fait un rêve assez intense Juomi, à la limite du rêve lucide.La prochaine fois tâche de plus t'y impliquer . Bonne continuation onirique ;) .

Posté par Bat, 02 juin 2008 à 19:45