A Dream Sequence

I lay on the grass, watching the clouds move across the sky above me. I wanted to reach out and touch its silver-blue edges. I tried to move my arms, but they were tied to the platform on which I lay. I had not realized I was bound to the platform until a minute ago. I lay still as the clouds shifted and made way for a scarlet haze; a stifling heat took hold of the air. I looked to my right and thousands of eyes stared back at me. I saw my parents somewhere in the audience. I saw someone else whose presence I could not fathom in the midst of what was happening - myself, as a child. She walked in, in her Karate uniform, double-braided and just discovering bloodied garments between her legs. She looked at me across the room full of prying eyes.

A man heaved himself on to me; I moaned - once, twice, thrice...feeling little but a paralysis working its way through me. I was a passenger in this sequence of events. I could do little but take the fragmented images and tuck them away somewhere in my memory. I heard the audience praise me for my performance, my artistry. My audience, poring over me, lauded my ability to lay still on a stretcher while a man thrust back and forth on my naked body. 

The windows squeaked, a gust of warm wind ever so slightly stirred the hairs on my cheek. I woke with a start. My boyfriend, Ahon, sat on a recliner in front of me. His toes rubbed against my knee. 

“Vivid dreams,” said Ahon. “Everyone’s having them these days.”

I fished a cigarette out of the see-through gift-box next to me. I held it between my fingers while they shook. I steadied my grip as I leaned forward towards Ahon. He pulled the trigger of the clipper between my cupped hands. I inhaled the comforting smell of burning ash. Small dust particles swirled around in the light. The room was a burning yellow.

“How long has it been?”, I asked. 

“A few hours… Turns out people are sleeping a lot since the lockdown began. Symptoms of depression.”

“I see.”

I lay back and rested my head against the wall. I closed my eyes. “It’s springtime.”

I stood in a grey, bleak room with one window looking out to the sea. The skies were overcast, reminiscent of the old English countryside. I put spices in a cauldron and the water bubbled up furiously. I tried to look for a fire but there were no matches on the shelves. I slammed open the door and hobbled down the stones to where the sea was. It seemed to be moving farther and farther away, the closer I moved towards it. The blue and the green in the sky moved in streaks and disappeared among the haze. I could feel myself running out of time. I tried to listen to the waves crashing against the shore, but the sound was elusive. I moved freely from the beach down a road with pine trees on either side. My clothes began to slip away. I found myself in a room full of others in similar states of undress. We sat and talked on a rug with Arabian colors. 

We left the room and eventually found ourselves on a roof. I met some old friends there. I hesitated to take off my bra, but an all-too-familiar young man with square-rimmed spectacles assured me that he and the other cool kids had often walked across the rooftops without their clothes on. We walked across what I could perceive as high-rise buildings; we jumped across the fences and made our way from one roof to the other. The bright, warm afternoon stretched out in front of us and led us to a forest, where we lay down and clicked photographs.

I woke up in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Ahon was brewing a cup of tea; the room was alight and I could see the posters of Daft Punk and Shutter Island on the other wall coming off from the wall. Cracked paints hung around its edges like ominous signs of inevitable decay. 

“You’re laughing because your serotonin levels have peaked”, said Ahon, sitting next to me, indifferent to the inner workings of my subconscious. 

“No, I was laughing because my dreams were funny.”

“You were not dreaming. Let’s go to the roof. We can jump across to the next building.”

We walked across the rooftops of the closely huddled buildings of the complex. Wood shavings picked at my bare feet. A brown dog followed us. I held in my hand a mug of tea and a box of cigarettes. 

We found a corner from where the lights flickered at a distance, into the thick of the forest behind the town. We saw foxes sprinting across the empty grounds. I could see a uniformed man carrying a chair across the edge of the driveway of his designated building. He switched off the hall lights. I lay down on the cold, cemented floor of the terrace. The color of the sky was transforming - the turquoise blue infinity made way for a sea-blue shade, the one that beckons cold winter dusks. The edges of an orange disc began to loom on the horizon. An unobtrusive ball of light, it quietly moved up until all I could see was a scarlet circular object. Streaks of red and orange had already pervaded the gaps between entwined shadows of trees. A flight of birds moved seamlessly across the spectrum of my vision.

“I feel like God, moving things around”, said the humanoid shape next to me.

Existence did not have to be reduced by the words of another, thought I.

***

I pictured a woman in a dress walking down an empty road with a suitcase packed with belongings. She wears a hat to protect herself against the scorching midday sun.

I was folding my last cardigan, planning out which luggage I would squeeze it into before tossing it among a pile of undergarments. I lit a cigarette and wiped Ahon’s drawers clean out of habit before putting the matchbox back where I found it.

I stared at the wall strewn with all its collectibles and wall-hangings - most of them curated by me in various adventures. There was a painting of a young woman walking across yellow fields with her bicycle pinned to a blue notice board. I sighed and wondered how long I had been hibernating in someone else’s cave.

A pleasant and welcoming breeze brushed the baby hairs on the side of my neck. I turned around and looked at the olive and magenta leaves spiraling down from the blooming trees. A dash of pink interrupted my vision and drew me to the bougainvillea across the street. My long-abandoned bicycle waited for me there. I smiled like the wildflowers that grow in crystal vases in the dark corners of old houses.