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Corridor

Dreamed 1996/12/23 by Barbara Heninger

The corridor is white or grey, and quiet.
The doors array themselves in rows
before me, beside me, a nested labyrinth of mazeways.
I hear muffled music or voices.
I have been inside some of those rooms
but I do not know how to get back in.
I am already in something else: the corridor.
In a moment, someone is going to come out
of a door.

If it is my husband, he will be wearing a rope
tied around his ankle, too tight;
he loves the knot, though his skin festers.
I will want to salve that wound, untangle the bond,
cure that cut with a touch, but
my hands will be too heavy to raise.
They lie in my lap, useless flesh,
the thumbs pointing down, fingers curved floorward with gravity.
My husband will pass me as he walks slowly to another door,
he does not see me,
he passes through, the rope dragging behind.

If it is my lover, he will be wearing kaleidoscope glasses
with pictures of naked women.
His clever hands will reach for the one closest to him.
He tilts his head,
he is listening to something, I cannot catch the melody,
but I can see the wave of sound, purple and gold
and blue, twining him.
His hand will brush my cheek as he passes
and I will ache, but he steps over me
and turns a corner of the corridor
his steps flaring sparks against the flinty tile.

If it is my daughter, her heart will be wearing a door
matching those in the corridor.
It stands open, and I can almost see into
its little, red room.
She is crying for me to fill it
with furniture, and I want to put my two fingers
into that doll's house, cluttered and tumbled,
to straighten the tiny bed, stroke the tiny cat.
My hands stay empty.
Her door stands open.
Our emptiness surges out from the doors, all of them,
in a wind so thick and hot I cannot take breath.
Through the viscous air I see her eyes, wide:
we are both drowning.
Our hands clasp, finally, together.

Editor's Notes

For years I assumed that the corridor with many doors, each opening into a different dream world (often different dreamers' minds) was a common dream, a convenient image for shared dreaming. It crops up in fiction--I first saw it at age ten, in Andre Norton's Ordeal in Otherwhere. It's explored in detail in Kirsten Gier's trilogy Dream a little Dream of Me; Dream On; and Just Dreaming. It even shows up in the My Little Pony world, in a spinoff comic, Friends Forever, v.5: Princess Luna and Discord.

And yet in a lifetime of dreamwork, including hundreds of apparent telepathic/shared dreams, I've never walked that corridor once. Barbara's is the only actual dream of it that I've ever seen.

Source: World World by Barbara Heninger, (1996; p.30-31)



LISTS AND LINKS: architecture - world-doors - triangles - blindness - parenting - kids - love - telepathic dreams? - dream poems - the Corridor of Time, in Futility; the Corridor of Lives, in Pastlife Midden

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