A strange dream

I’ve been working on an essay the last 3 weeks or so that I’ve really been wrestling with - it’s balooned out of control very quickly and taken me off on all sorts of tangents. And while, on the one hand I know that if I’m ever going to bring it into being I’m going to have to stop speculating somewhere and impose some sort of limitations (and thus form) on it, I’m also loathe to stop the process. It’s been frustrating.

I’ve been thinking about it so intently that I’ve actually dreamt about the structure of the outline a few nights in a row now. Tonight, as I was lying in bed with my head spinning trying to drift off, I head a clang from the drier running a load of sheets and somehow my brain processed that and added to it a blinding flash of light over my head. I was so startled I immediately sat up in bed, but when I saw my wife sleeping I realized she hadn’t seen it and that it was just a dream or a misfired synapse of some sort.

I went back to sleep. and began dreaming that I was thinking about this outline again. At some point I seemed to have had the idea that I could literalize a certain metaphor and so make the point I was trying to make very effectively. In the dream the thought also occurred to me that I could only get away with this particular trick a few times in the essay since it wouldn’t bear too much scrutiny if I tried to over do it, - the topic I was trying to write about was basically a paradoxical one that pointed to an unknown - something outside the sphere of human knowledge.

The telephone rang. I answered it and heard a scratchy, distant voice: “I’m at your door.” I was frightened. Then someone began knocking at the front door insistently. I tried to look through the keyhole but the outline was indeterminate. I was angry. “WHo are you ? WHo are you? WHo are you?” I began to say louder and louder, until finally I woke myself up

I awoke bathed in sweat. I went onto my porch and had a cigarette and thought about it. I don’t have nightmares often but when I do they usually end this way.

I had dropped a pebble in a well I knew to be bottomless and was shocked when I heard an echo. By obsessing over a question I knew to be unanswerable I had summoned forth something that didn’t exist before. Like the essay itself its contours were difficult to discern. Some kind of duppy or golem had heard my call and reponded, coming to my home to greet me - a visitor from the realm of paradox, a just-born representive of the land of unanswerable questions, the lurker at the threshold, myself.

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