When
I was young I had a recurring nightmare whenever I was ill.
I guess it must have been brought on by high fevers. There
were no people present (not even a "me" in person form,
only as some kind of consciousness), and there was no
setting - some very large sort of darkness - a black void,
sort of like how we might imagine outer space, (though it
had no such label in the dream - outer space was not what
it was). Very large - huge - boulder-type things (they were
not boulders, any more than the void was outer space) were
rolling on tiny tiny threads, in this huge emptiness. There
was something living about them - as if they were conscious
entities that had the *intention* of rolling along these
threads. I can't describe why. Nor can I describe why this
was terrifying, but it was. The most enormous fear,
somehow, was created by the discrepancy between the
enormity of the "boulders" (planet-like) and the tiny
frailness of the threads they were balanced upon over the
void. There was also an associated noise, spooky and sort
of human - very similar to the breathy "uh-uh" which Laurie
Anderson used, years later (long after I stopped having the
dream), to back "Oh Superman". (I could never listen to
that record - it reminded me too much of my nightmare!)
There's no explanation for this really - what it is
supposed to be or why it was so consistently terrifying
(when I had a temperature as a child, I used to be afraid
to go to sleep in case I had "the dream"). Maybe it relates
to some kind of pre-birth experience, which would explain
why words aren't really adequate to describe it. Anyway,
after a reign of terror lasting a decade, it stopped
happening sometime during my adolescence.
F. 37