Category: Dream reports

The scene is the area of Brunswick where my mother lives and where I lived from the age of fourteen. There are cafés that are familiar to me or to my dreams… I can’t remember whether they are real places. I am being attacked. Hopeless at fighting, all I can do is hold on tight. I manage to get the man, who my mother knows, into an arm-lock that effectively paralyses all attempts at escape. This is fine, except that I must hold him in this position forever if I am to escape being beaten up. So, I hold on tight. The struggle goes on a long time. We are able to move our legs. Slowly, the struggle moves from the doorway of one of the cafés to the footpath. And then from the footpath to the gutter. And then from the gutter to the road. We stop the oncoming traffic, the drivers looking from inside their cars at the peculiar way I am pressing his face into the bitumen. It seems necessary at this point to clear the road, so the struggle moves slowly back into the gutter, and then from the gutter back onto the footpath. At least an hour has gone by, maybe two hours. We are exhausted and the struggle must end somehow soon. When I let go, both of us are so weakened that neither attempts any further attack or defence. Instead I find myself slumped in a chair in what appears to be some kind of club. It is dark inside and the music very loud. I am surrounded by a crush of young people. Directly in front of the row of seats where I am is a large console, like an electronic juke box, with a touch screen a dozen feet wide and six feet high displaying the timeline of songs chosen by the people at the club and the thousands of other choices that can be made by anyone who has managed to make their way through the crowd to the screen. I feel out of place, until I realise that everyone is happy and no one seems to mind me being here. The only worrying thing about this place is that its mood seems to be chemically induced. A girl sitting next to me offers me something to take. “It won’t hurt you,” she says. It doesn’t look very nice, though. I take the smallest bite off it. It is chocolate on the outside and has the acidic taste of adrenaline on the inside. “Thank you,” I say, but I don’t take another bite.

A Dickensian curmudgeon is standing high up in the stacks of bookstore on stairs that wind around all its walls—up, down and across. The Dickensian curmudgeon talks to the three of us in increasingly haughty and threatening tones, but about what, exactly, it is difficult to say. The subject of his talk appears to be very specific and very useful, like the books in his bookshop, which are on subjects like ‘Production in 1878’ or ‘Conditions report—March to April’. We listen to him speak but don’t really know what he is talking about. We can hear a tapping sound in the background, though, that is getting louder and louder. At first, I believe he is making this noise with his hand on the railings of the stairs that wind around the book stacks. However, the sound has become unbearably loud. The sound is actually coming from somewhere else and the Dickensian curmudgeon is only keeping time with it. There’s no discussion and before I know what has happened the curmudgeon is dead. When the body is hidden and the laneway entrance to the bookshop bricked up so that there does not appear to be any shop there at all, we remember there was another way in. A new bookshop can be opened from the old one’s rear entrance. The others weakly attempt a celebration, dress up and sing verses of a comic opera—something where the rhymes are new but the music always sounds the same. It’s a total failure and not very comic. One of the others, far off, sings “We’re off to sleep now the old man’s dead.” I interrupt the black recital: “Oh, no, we’re not going off to bed… And that’s vaginal!”

I am in a Malaysian prison that has an enormous interior courtyard. It is just like a real Malaysian prison, except mine has a beautiful marble colonnade, with very attractive marble columns and a beautiful white marble floor (very slippery and a lot of fun), surrounding the courtyard. Well, the digs are fine but, nevertheless, a fight ensues … between the inmates and the guards. And, at first, the inmates appear to be winning. Then it gets serious and, in a far off corner, I see that some men in white uniform are entering the fray. It takes a short while to figure out what they have in their hands. Then, I see they are carrying crossbows and have already begun shooting people. Of course, it is time to retreat. After a short run to push off I slide on my belly the whole length of one side of the marble colonnade and even make it around the corner. Somehow I manage to avoid detection and survive the murderous mayhem that is cutting everyone else down.

Everyone gets off. I head for the stairs and arriving at them remember how long, how impossible they are. There, you can see them climbing along the wall, traversing the wall between floor and the ceiling that is probably hundreds of feet high. I head back to take the more conventional route, which involves negotiating a series of moving footpaths that have been installed for the public’s convenience. The system is simple. You get on a footpath that takes the name of your destination; get off wherever it ends, and continue to look for the footpath that names your destination. If you persist you arrive, eventually. I get on the path for Paris, and it escorts me to the other side of the hallway, where it proves impossible to find another path to Paris. Not very helpful. A bit like de Gaulle airport. I struggle on for a while and come to an empty cul de sac… an open reception area where no one bothers to stay, though the view out onto the sidewalk is quite promising, and makes me wonder how I have managed to become so ‘elevated’. However, I notice that the stairway leading down from this reception area to the station entrance is made of stairs each of which must be fifteen or twenty feet high. The precipice is impossible to negotiate. The architects have omitted to provide a way out. It’s, really, very frustrating. People appear to have found their way out, though. Or have they? The moving footpaths are empty, the novelty of it all having worn off. It looks as though the only thing to do is to get back on a train.

I am in the foyer of a large block of apartments in China. There are no people to be seen anywhere. There are enormous elevators with heavy, steel doors on the ground floor. The buttons to call the elevators are inconveniently located about seven feet above ground level. I suppose it must be nearly impossible for most people here to reach the buttons and I imagine that one person might have to climb onto another’s shoulders in order to reach them. The elevators, in any case, do not take people to different floors, but instead to different levels of a puzzle the purpose of which is not clear. One floor is a hallway with open rooms, like large cubicles, coming off it. Chinese men in business suits are lounging around the cubicles, seated on banquettes along the walls. Another floor is a decrepit restaurant where everything, the walls, the floors the ceilings, the wooden fittings are all painted with the same dark, cream-colored enamel paint, much of which is either peeling or chipped. Another floor is a series of increasingly claustrophobic, crowded rooms. The last of these rooms is nothing more than a portal into which I must put my head in order to see the interior—so that I seem to be in the room without being in it at all. But from this last room, I find, there is no exit.

The man in the red dress must go. I am not sure why, exactly, but he must go. I am not even sure that it is a dress. It looks like a dress. He is a man. I am sure of that. This is not the proper place for a man in a red… And I don’t know what he does. He walks around the airport with a clipboard or a bag, especially in that area where there is a narrow lane way between two streets, approaching people in the street, performing his duties. It is not an airport, or not just an airport; not, in any case, if there are streets and narrow lane ways. I work here. I don’t know what he does. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone knows what he does. He’s not important. He just dresses himself up, comes into work each day and performs his function—which can’t be a good thing. In any case, I don’t know and, perhaps, it is not my business. I am not his supervisor. It is not, strictly, my business, except that I am here, too, and I should know these things. I hate him. That’s it. I hate the red dress. I hate the way he dolls himself up. I hate the way he parades himself in the street pretending to be someone who has a function here, pretending to work. I could say, zeroing in on the very heart of the matter, that it is his redness that makes me red; but that isn’t it, really. It is really his hair. His hair that looks long, black, and like a woman’s, from a distance; but which I remember distinctly appears to be quite normal when viewed close-up. It is the effeminacy of the man that is so guiling. He is not what he seems. I hate it. I have not even met the man—I don’t know who he is—and yet I hate him. His red dress. His black hair. His thin, wily body. His indeterminate sexual presence. He is a man in a dress—a red dress—and I don’t know what he does. He works with me, and I don’t know what he does. I do not have a place to work—not a ‘place’ in the sense of an office, a definite place where I must go. This place, these streets, is where I work.