Night Vision

Together, Y and I emerge from what seems to be a metro station. We are in the Netherlands – apparently, because this is the only place where I am going to be able to have a fully fledged music career. I know this somehow. She seems to be the one taking the lead, though.

I’m going to enroll in a university here, and it seems as if the staircase leads directly into one of the buildings. I examine my surroundings – white tiled walls with mosaic patterns as the staircase ends, leading into a hallway. This building is where art classes are held. The two of us walk into a large studio classroom that’s filling up with students as if the class is about to begin. She takes a seat, and I take one next to her. After a few minutes, the professor begins speaking – English seems to be the language of instruction here – and students go to a series of large wooden bins along one wall, pulling out various kinds of bones. They take the bones back to the tables and begin to sketch them. I go over, grab what looks like it might be a vertebra, and also begin to draw.

Later, a lot of time seems to have passed – maybe a year. I’m checking an electronic billboard in a campus building.

13.4.25


The dream started as a sort of school/workplace dream, I think, but shifted at some point to a setting like an abandoned barn. I’m here with a man who seems familiar, as if maybe he’s based on people I actually know, and we’re talking. A black cat with a red collar that I recognize as L is also here: he comes over to sit next to me, and I pet him.

Planes are passing by overhead. I can see them through a hole in the roof – too close, it seems to me, and very loud. I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of the sky, either. It’s too dark for this time of day. A storm is brewing.

The wind picks up, and keeps picking up. I can feel the building beginning to be pulled up into the air. So it is here, about to upend my life the way it has so many others. I’m not afraid. I knew it would only be a matter of time. I just have to stay calm and focused.

I am up in the air now, which is full of debris spun by the winds in the strange light of the storm. As I’m blown by the winds, I let the world spin, as if I’m the point of stability, and it’s only everything else that’s moving around relative to me.

Unsurprisingly, this level of focus is pulling me into latent lucidity. I am flying now, making a beeline for the source of all this trouble. I don’t know how exactly to describe it – it must be a bit like it would be for a dog or something following a scent trail, but more abstract than that – some kind of recognizable trace left behind in the mindscape, becoming stronger as I approach.

I land in a neighborhood – not an especially nice one. Small, prefabricated houses jumbled too close together, a few completely inadequate attempts at greenery. Barely a step above a trailer park, really. It is now late out. I walk to the house the trail leads to, stepping straight through the door. I’ve never been here before, but I can see it all in my mind. The trace leads into a sort of narrow office past the kitchen – a closed-off, unpleasant, musty, crawly kind of mental signature that the whole place figuratively reeks of. It’s strongest around the computer, which has a big, boxy kind of monitor of a sort that probably went extinct years ago.

But in the kitchen, I run into A and C, an older couple I’ve known for a number of years. This is their house. Suddenly, it’s as if the scenario not only is different, but has been different the entire time. I have come here to warn them about what is going to happen. And so the question of what exactly would have happened to that computer will forever remain a mystery....

17.4.25