I used to have this dream recurrently around the ages of nine, ten, eleven.

I'm floating in a strangely two-dimensional state. It's the most blissful feeling. I have hardly any sense of myself, or rather I myself have become pure sensation. Around me is a brilliantly pale element which is neither quite water nor quite air. It's more solid than either, forming a clear line of horizon above me, while at the same time cushioning me, buoying me up. Its surfaces are so pure and smooth. They seem to run right through me; wave on wave of sublime smoothness.

It's as if my soul is being stroked.

Then the other element, similarly single-planed, starts to descend. It comes down slowly--you could say like a cloud but it's more like the entirety of the sky: huge, dark, oppressive. But its main characteristic is its texture. Gritty, grainy, scratchy; like a massive random doodle in barbed wire.

I try to scream as inexorably it draws closer. The sublime waves have stopped running through me. However wide I open my mouth my screams grow fainter. The grainy mass has touched the smooth horizon, spilled through it, begun to claw and press its weight into the smoothness's depths. My mouth is miles wide but no sound comes out.

The grittiness has swallowed all the light. It touches me.

I wake...

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, p.162-3

EDITOR'S NOTE

I chose to present this dream because twice I too have dreamed healing waves passed through me: Spirit Chorus and The Black Wave. It's an extraordinary sensation.

I had a similar recurring nightmare, too, as a small child: The Wires. Years later I learned it was a buried memory of a real event: my uncle had told me, age two or three, how he'd been tortured in a mental institution--given massive electroshock.

So I wonder... what provoked Haydn's barb wire blanket, stifling her bliss?

--Chris Wayan

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