When I finally relented and decided to tell this story the question of where to start almost prevented me from doing so. So many points presented themselves as worthy of being the beginning. The coldness of the room, the particular color of darkness, the soreness in my leg, the conversation I had with my mother which I was thinking about there in that particular color of darkness in that cold room, wondering when the heater would come on; these and countless other ephemera clamored to be included. All of them arguing that they were needed to get to the core of the story and all of them also conspiring to take me away from the core.
Basta!
All of that and countless other conditions found me in bed trying to decide whether or not to pull on the blanket. An image of a pier popped into my mind. A pier I remember from a dream I had forgotten. A dream I had last night. I remember I had walked to the end of that pier and then climbed over the side where I was to climb into an amphitheatre which hung off the pier. Below was only Nothingness. The amphitheatre was full. I was playing a slave. Most of the dream to this point had been me trying to get out of the role because I knew that I was going to forget my lines. In fact, one of the reasons I knew I was going to forget my lines was because I had not seen the script. We the actors, were intermingled with the audience because the amphitheatre was also a boat with stone sides. The play had begun the moment I had climbed down from the pier. My appearance had been the opening act. The queen was waiting for the scroll I brought. I gave it to her and gave a long monologue on what it meant. The whole time I was speaking I was thinking “Wow, pretty good considering I only glimpsed the script briefly in ANOTHER DREAM, I had forgotten long ago”. Later on in the dream, I did finally forget my lines but that isn’t important to the story. Only the pier is needed for the story at hand.
What is important about that pier is that there was the flesh of a dream still on it when it popped into my mind there in that particular darkness. I was able to recall the dream that had been lost. Too often when I try to recall a dream that I know I had and that was significant, I can’t reach it. So this time, as I took that image of the pier and grasped it, I suddenly saw it’s connection to the images from a ton of other lost dreams. I saw it as a bridge in one dream where I lived and died on both sides of the interstate in Fort Worth. Or as the Bay Bridge in another dream, in which instead of going from Oakland to San Francisco, the other end from which you set out was the Nothing. Or another dream, the bridge in which I traveled in the girders and understructure in order to get to the subways while trying to get away from something. There were other dreams where that pier was not a bridge but something else but as I write this I am forgetting them, again. I know that the point was not that they were similar images or symbols but that they were all aspects in common that recalled lost dreams. Something about Identity. Seriously, something about Identity. But I don’t know what.
I guess all those points clamoring for the attention did in fact derail the story after all.
