dream trauma

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
                                          -- from Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger


I had a dream. 

I was somehow tuned into an international radio show (90.5 on the dream dial). It was a culture show, with an English-speaking announcer. Someone known to me began speaking their poem-song. A voice in a language I don't know. A voice imbued with great and worldly qualities. A poem-song beautiful, poignant, and profound. About things beyond my experience and existence. Of things in a realm to which I don't belong. Spoken-sung in a transporting cadence. The lyrics moving on a subtle melody. Her voice was so very far above me in its rich conveyance of poetic atmospheres, of visionary eloquence. In a language I don't know, yet the gist of the poem-song came to me between the lines. As if the music of her voice translated the words.

When her poem-song was over, I turned off the radio. I went outside, eventually wandering into an unknown, colorful little neighborhood.  A car stopped to pick me up. Inside were four men, belonging to an ancient and foreign religious affiliation. I settled into the back seat. In the front seat, one of them began speculating about a secret, apocalyptic code. A number gleaned from his studies in Kabbalah. 

I soon realized they were driving me toward my home, from when I was a little boy. I asked them to pull over and let me walk alone the rest of the way. The old hill, the other side of which lay my childhood house, grew steeper as I approached. I began struggling to find handholds in what had now become a boulder-strewn mountainside. The brush and forlorn roots hanging here and there morphed into frozen water sprays. The heat of my climbing caused the ice-sprays to begin melting. This somehow triggered the bursting through of a terrible river above. Torrents of floodwater poured over and onto me, washing me back down the mountain(hill)side. The old road I had taken was now a hopeless ravine. I was swept away into death and eternal oblivion.

I woke up.


So...isn't it astonishing how consciousness can speak to itself allegorically, through the ambiguous form of an oneiric tale?