Vision has now awoken in the boundless black abyss of my slumber, like the slow accumulation of dew finding its weight to animate and drop into the river. Dreams are born with the material of life: my eyes, my noiseless inner voice, shapes and colours in concept, sound an imagined thing, imagined in a dream! What dream is this?

It’s not the dream of the wasteland high-security warehouse inhabited by gun-toting chimps. I’ve never returned there since I asked myself the purpose of my mission.

Nor is it the dream of infinite rolling landscapes of geometric lines, chasing me by fear alone, reducing my own physicality, rendering everything but my own existence and denying a being to be chased. I’m free of this place now, although I don’t know how.

I’m in a place of clean white, its planes determined only by the objects that intersect them. I am standing upon stacked cubes. Two tiers down is an unfamiliar woman; her body facing me, her face in profile. My immediate interest but not my focus, her features are generic. She is but a white face, a buzz of brown hair, an unremarkable height, a shapeless jacket. When I stand beside her she stands in front of me. I look beyond her towards the door.

I know how this dream ends, I remember this place now. It ends when I reach the bus stop on the avenue leaving town.

Released from my thought I notice she has gone. I climb down and open the door.

I’m in a corridor of seemingly infinite length, whitewashed but periodically aglow with ochre as if illuminated by an otherwise absent filament bulb. I have no sensation of effort as I glide ahead. When I turn to look along a perpendicular entrance my whole being is charged with its direction and I continue down a different yet identical passage. To look is to go.

After countless repetitions (told to be countless and not experienced) there are now a group of teenage boys with flamethrowers hastening angrily towards me. Ochre is now paled by heat haze and spurting serpents of Seville orange. I continue my mechanical changes of course and each time the boys restart their insurgence.

I’m disappointed it’s not the chimps, but why? My disappointment is irrational. This is a different world.

After countless repetitions (told to be countless and not experienced) I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, open the door and close it behind me. I feel my panic but I witness no evidence of its expression. Stood before me, once again, is the woman. For the first time, I concentrate on her face and try to depict its features but my mind only notes that I’m taking note of her features. As she speaks, I see her shallow, raspberry pink lips convulse and hula.

“You have to understand, life now has infinite choice. Infinite choice!”

She clasps my hand. I see her hand. Her fingers are silken bars of milk. I look up. She smiles. I see her eyes. Her eyes are French cut emeralds reflecting the glint of an ocean.

“Go back and make your choices. You will eventually find your safety.”

“But which way should I go?”

She recites a never-ending list of options (told to be never-ending and not experienced). I choose to listen. I zone out and pass through her. I absorb her. Her chatter continues as it wraps around the back of my neck.

I go back through the door and find myself where I started: upon the top cube and the woman two tiers below me. Her lips synchronise to her chatter still wrapped around my neck. She reaches up to offer me her hand and guides me out of the room.

Instead of finding ourselves in the corridor, we are outside looking down the fig-lined avenue, wrought against a tricolour of cobalt, olive and tar. The boys are piling out of an adjacent building. The woman lets go of my hand, screaming and running away down the avenue.

I want to stop her. I don’t want the dream to end. I don’t want to die.

I stand in paralysis and when she reaches the bus stop I wake up.

This month's favourites:
   Danger Mouse & Karen O, Lux Prima
   Vladimir Nabakov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
   When Marnie Was There (2014)