Blotting Paper

I used to have a bizarre recurrent dream where I was in a completely white landscape, a three-dimensional sheet of paper, empty except for a crudely drawn, child's idea of a house – a wooden cube, slatted in unblemished logs that never came from a living tree, yellow-lit, steamy windows, amiably puffing chimney like an old man's pipe, all under a brilliant white sky that was somehow bright without being distinct. There was no division in colour and perspective between the sky and the land. Clumped around the house in a geometrical spinney were four trees; arrow-straight brown trunks, with five cantilevered branches projecting from the crown, then a fuzz of scribbled green lines for the leaves.

The house stood at the bottom of a hill – there were gradients in this landscape, although because of the radiance of the sky, there were no shadows, so you couldn’t see an angle until you started walking up (or down) it. I used to be at the top of this steep hill, this ghost hill, and for some reason or other, I had to run down to the bottom, racing against (I have no idea why) the White Queen in the Narnia books. I always used to get off the mark with a comfortable lead, and my feet became winged and the air parted like a curtain as I sped downhill at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, but she gained on me step by step as I began to slow, and instead of breaking the barrier and winning, she always drew level with me. Then, glancing left, she stretched and warped and fused, like burning photographs or smeared oil-paintings, and then I did too.

I used to be able to think I could feel my component cells, then atoms stretching like elastic to the invisible horizons – not painful, but excruciatingly uncomfortable and alien. The space between my molecules became an empty ocean, then a gulf filled with wheeling points of light, then a void so vast and incalcuble and touched with faint stars at distances so massive as to be functionally infinite that my mind, even within the dream, shut down entirely.

Well, around about this point, I assume my brain used to mentally hiccup, as happens when you encounter something that is just too big and strange (Thinking about what was there before God, and before that, and before thatargharghargh) and triped over the quantum door-step into confused awakening.

There’s probably some deep Freudian pulse to all this, but I don’t know what it is and I won’t linger on it.