In the days of my childhood, I had cultivated the habit of carrying my dream from one night to the next. I would lie asleep hanging tightly to the loose thread of dream every night. Night after night, like a seamstress, I went about stitching my thoughts into the fabric of dreamscape. Over a period of time, I had mastered the art of remembering the dreams. With a trained mind, I slipped the loose thread of dream from the preceding night into the eye of my mind’s needle and went about stitching.
Behind my house, where the ground sloped to meet a marsh, there was a community hall. The hall was constructed amid much fanfare and left alone later. Languishing in its shadows was a hand pump on a round platform; one had to step over three steps to reach it. The hall was constructed on the bend of an ancient canal; legend has it that it supplied fresh water to the indigenous people of the place about three centuries earlier. Presently though, it was home to thick undergrowth of grasses, rushes and reeds.
There was one dream in particular that enchanted me; sort of a recurring dream that grew abundantly on my fecund mind. It began on a starry night as I collapsed after daylong travails of bowling short pitch balls in the colony’s cricket ground.
That night in the dream, thick moss coated crawlers sneaked out to slip into the hall’s railing; like a giant sea octopus, the marsh seemed to stretch its green tentacles around the hall. The flat roof of the hall was supplanted with crawlers growing in from both sides, lending it the sinister appearance of a green truss overhead. Thick velvet cushions of moss had skirted the window sill and the door frame.
Here, the first installation of my bewitching dream ended.
On a Sunday evening, when the neighbourhood had its cross wires on television sets, I sneaked out of my home, through the sloping ground, to the community hall. At the doorstep, a sparrow that had been pecking at its wings, flitted nervously, and out it flew away. Suspended form the portico was a flimsy gauze curtain of spider web; in the knots and frills of this curtain were half a dozen caterpillars, some alive and some dead. The door was locked but I dint loose heart. Watching my step, with one hand on the wooden lintel of the entrance, I snuggled into the narrow pathway around the house that led me to a back door. A frog hopped onto the roof of my right foot to startle me in an already irresistible place.
That night after returning home from the hall, I relapsed on a rolling chair and wondered how so fortunate I was. Everybody gets to dream; but I was undergoing a unique spell on the dreamscape, where I stitched my collected memories of reality into the dream at night.
That night my dream blossomed in a spring spree. Near the back door, a eucalyptus tree stood baring its roots. The tree had uprooted the basement of the hall; a wide crack now ran along the diagonal of the rear wall. Shards of bricks extended outside the cement gums to streak the wide brazen lips of the crack. It was ominously dark inside; the floor was carpeted with cement bags and over it laid rusted hollow shafts of the bore well. These shafts were once lowered through the rock splintered throat of the bore that in a not so distant past, spat bouts of fresh water. When tiny human hands closed their fists over this creature’s elongated tongue, its metallic geared gums were put into motion and out came fresh water. But that was in the past, now the shafts were pulled out of the timeworn dusty throat; the corroded metal gums creaked and the lapping tongue whined piteously when human fists prodded it.
The tree’s bark, dark red in colour, was deeply furrowed and coated with dry lines of sap. Although it seemed hard and rough, a patch of spongy long fibres caught my attention. When I dug the tip of a sharp twig into it, a stirring motion stemmed from underneath my heels. It was as though the tree had been dormant all these years, and now the spongy ignition switch had put it into motion. One, two three…with every thrust of the twig, the ironbark gave into a sap spree. The long fibres on the bark peeled off by themselves, and exposed strips of pores that bled profusely like open sores. Sap that melted off the treetop ran along the length of the bark and in its wake, managed to close some of the pores. And so it was that in a matter of ten minutes, sap formed a new furrowed coating on the bark and the bleeding ceased.
Here, in the morning, I re-examined my dream. Apparently, the idea of stitching memories from reality into the dreams was blooming mesmerizingly. In the day, I bicycled my way into the wetland behind the community hall. I sat crouched for hours and observed the wetland: shifting leaves overhead; dry red mud at my feet; larvae, butterfly; broad leaves and sprouts; tenuous termites building tenacious camps – I registered every single detail in my memory files.
That night, feeding from my memory files, my dream galloped like a young horse. Bulbous larvae with shiny furrowed backs, were feeding on the leaves. An axe with a pitted wooden handle was propped against the bark of the tree where it was damaged. From the injured bark, shoots sprouted out copiously. Sap, like tear drops, smeared the underside of the deep gash left by an axe whose wooden handle now rested in the fossilised remains of termite guts. The Termites had left no splinter unturned; they were closing in on the tree, forming rings and rimming the tree. Like the bump on a horse back, the red globe was lingering on the coast of the blue sky; patchy shade of limply hanging eucalyptus leaves painted the crack on the wall.
The axe head at my feet was covered in a slime of sap. Plucking a leaf from one of the low hanging braches, I mustered the courage to wipe the sap off it. In a minute, a teeming colony of leafhoppers scurried out of their burrows. Loading their backs with spongy sap, they hurried back to the base before it dried up. Their backs were fragmented into three segments with movable spines in each of them. Like a rail wagon, the preceding segment hugged the one tailing it. The engine head, a red one with a pair of stiff bristled antennae, carried the load enroute to the burrows where they unloaded it.
Then, in the morning, I had an idea. I wondered if I can force feed emotions into my dream. I visited the hall again and looked inside through the dusty glass pane. A faint feeling of apprehension crawled up my mind without my notice. Out of my volition, I glued my eyes to the interior of the hall and forced my mind to register a mystery. The way my dream was developing, it was only natural that I attempted to inject a touch of mystery into it.
That night before I fell asleep, I seemed to tell my mind ‘surprise me’. And it did more than merely surprise. My dream was about to take a daring route. To escape the march of leafhoppers, I turned my heel towards the cracked wall. Through the sifting shadows of drooping leaves, I dislodged a pair of brick teeth from their cemented gums and squatted low to gain access into the hall. My footing was unsteady, for the corroded bore shafts teetered under my weight. And the fall was all the more unpleasant, for I bruised my elbow badly in my attempt to hold on to the brick teeth of the crack. The smell of eucalyptus tree outside (grandma tells me it acts as an insecticide) must have kept the mosquitoes at bay. The inside however, was a cauldron of insects: winged and wingless.
A rattle snake in the corner stuck its pointy yellow tail outside the charcoal black body; bearing crooked upturned tails, two scorpions were mating under the shade of the moss lined window sashes. Mosquitoes droned like airplanes on a parade day; zooming past me one of them landed on my nape and stung while the other feasted hungrily on my plum left cheek. A lizard the size of my palm stretched its body before me like a puppy dog before extending its sticky tongue and pricing out the mosquito that was busy circling around my temple. The sand heap in the middle was pitted with burrows of rats. Around the rim of the heap were drops of blood as though they had been splashed from a height. Slowly, I rolled my eyes. Overhead, the roof was welted with bats that never batted an eyelid. One of them seemed to stir its pleated dark wings, flap flap…and then it calmed itself down as if on the whim of a second thought. They seemed so tensely hung from the roof, like they were waiting for the flick of a switch. By now it was so dark that I had to be a nocturnal creature myself, if I had to locate anything at all.
This was no place for a twelve year old to be. I turned my heel towards the crack. Over the dingy floor riddled with multifarious excrement, I proceeded towards the crack which had sealed itself. The creature had closed its cement gums over brick teeth. I dared not move for the fear of disturbing one of the creatures inside. But my resolve quickly gave away as a pair of segmented insect legs crawled up the roof of my left foot. Before its bulb head dug into my veins, I flinched and all hell broke loose. It was as though I had flicked a nocturnal switch that triggered a moonlit current which passed through the spines of all the slothful ruminating creatures. They had all come alive: the moon of the bats in my ears; the rattle of the snake around my toes as it slipped into one of my trouser legs; the croon of the blood red tip of the scorpion’s tail on my left shoulder; the nervous spring of the leafhoppers on my segmented spine; spongy kiss of the lizard’s underbelly on my upper lip; and fidgeting smelly paws of a pregnant female rat in my right armpit.
Just as a seamstress, lost in her muse, digs the needle into the skin of her fingers; I had stitched my subconscious trepidations into the dream. The invasion of barbarous subconscious mind left me locked in the dream to never wake again.
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