An encounter
I dreamt that I decided to visit school. The place where I studied as a child was a wonderful oasis of stone buildings, long pathways and drives, misty banyan trees and field after field for hockey, throwball, basketball – named by game. Fertile ground for subconscious messaging. In my dream, I decide to go there on a free day, to walk across the grounds. I take an auto. My driver is a large bearded man, possibly in his late forties.
Somewhere along the way, I fall asleep, and dream that I have already reached, that I’m already walking. I don’t know it at the time, but this is the closest I’ll get to actually arriving. I’m surprised by how quickly consciousness returns, though. The effect of the rain blowing in my face. We are close to the school gates. Just a little bit further, I say to the driver. But there’s a problem with the engine. I lose patience, decide to get down from the auto, walk ahead and meet him at the gates.
I catch him up and try to pay my fare. I sense some panic building, but I choose to ignore it.. Because now my erstwhile driver’s wife has turned up, and there is a lot of calling and packing and moving. I notice that the woman’s eyes have a strange, flat expression, very dark and not entirely human. Hunted.
Now, a new person gets into the driver’s seat, another big man, but older, with light brown eyes. His hair is white and his expression absolutely intractable. He looks at me with total indifference. They are now attaching two wheelbarrows to the auto. It looks unwieldy, but they give the auto a strange, chariot-like appearance. Nobody seems to notice me as I reach in for my bag. I pull out a bag without checking to see if it’s mine, but it’s empty. I wonder whether I’ve been robbed.
A little panicked, now, I fish around in the back again, and find another bag, and another. They are all brown leather bags, all empty, and they look eerily similar to bags I’d owned and discarded. In this moment, it occurs to me that I might be in the middle of a getaway plan organized by a ring of thieves. And yet, I haven’t been robbed. I’ve found my bag, and take out my wallet. I am still hell-bent on paying my fare, even though no one seems interested in it. I have, though, a small temptation to take back one of the empty bags. It looks heartbreakingly familiar. Like a thing that I used to have, which had run its course of usefulness, but had a ghostly connection with me, still. I chide myself, though, and let it go.
While I go through this little personal battle, the auto hasn’t moved, but the driver has changed, again. I take a close look at this third man to take that seat.
He has long black hair, a long beard, wild eyes. The word for him is ringleader, but for some reason the thought that comes into my head is this one’s the devil. Still unshaken in my resolve, I ask him for the fare. He ignores me, revs up and starts driving off, and now this entire action really looks like a getaway. I think about a devil’s chariot, with this strange man at the reins. I try to hold on, slow him down, to pay my fare, but he looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am.
Then I actually get into the auto. (You don’t get safety in a dream, even if you try, so why bother?) He speeds up. How much, I scream. He finally names a sum and I struggle to count it out in the wind, the rain, and the crazy wheeling auto with its attachments. I tell him to stop, but he doesn’t notice me. Stop, I shout, with all the authority I can muster in a dream voice.
And he does, right in front of a huge puddle, an overflowing drain. At this screeching halt, one of the wheelbarrows leaps forward, in the momentum, and hits a bicycle. I should say, kills the bicycle. It literally lands on top of it, crushes it, and then seems to commit suicide, its wheels collapsing as both fall together in a crumpled heap.
I hate to admit it, but my response to this scene of mini-calamity is to finally pay my fare and get down from the auto. We stand together, watching the wheels drown. I wonder whether giant devil-man will be angry with me. Instead, he throws back his head and laughs and laughs.
A second encounter
I am about to move into an apartment. The neighbourhood is one of those close-knit labyrinthine localities, where everyone knows everyone and newcomers get lost. I go down a corridor, and find, at the end of it, an outdoor kitchen, painted in horrible colours, a heavy cream and noisy pink. It makes me a little nauseous but when I get inside, I find a reasonably nice apartment, with an indoor kitchen as well, small and not beautiful but not ugly either. There are bulky damp mattresses everywhere.
My family is here, helping with the paperwork and initial deposit. I scout out the place try to look up my immediate neighbours, and find myself, somehow, at the entrance of another apartment. This one is full of kitsch furniture, intricately painted, in loud blues, things hanging from the ceiling; old-school, everything heavily decorated and curiously darkening and weighing down the space. A lot of gigantic egg-shaped cushions. It’s not a look that I’d love at all, but I appreciate the effort that’s gone into it. There is a couple sitting at the door, with a kind of bemused pride. I tell them that their place looks beautiful, and ready to move in. I tell them that we’ll be neighbours.
They say, but it’s not done yet, there’s a lot more work pending. It looks ready to me, I reply. How many boxes do you need to transport, they ask. Only three, I say. I feel a little embarrassed, because it seems like I’ve been living a makeshift life, have never really moved for real, have always been a dependent. That I haven’t collected enough things to be considered a real person, unlike these people who’d collected so much.
Then I walk back to ‘my’ place and continue exploring it. There is a raucous banging at the door. It turns out to be three doors, triple-locked. There is an opening for an animal – a dog or a cat to get in, and a broken tennis ball is thrown inside. I wait for the dog or cat to follow, but instead a man walks in. He is dark, with long hair, and I recognize him almost immediately – even say it out loud – this is the man from the other dream, the devil-man. I know this even though he’s not exactly the same. The body is a little different, the manner a little more domesticated, but the spirit is dense, opaque, overwhelmingly familiar. Everyone else dismisses this, and tells me to go to sleep.
I try to ignore him and sleep it off, or at least sleep my way out of this dream, but the man comes up to the bed. He takes my hand in his and kisses it. I am alarmed that no one seems to find this incongruous. He looks over my body in this measuring, appreciative way. It’s a strange look, possessive but not sexual. I’ve seen her before, he says to the world. Walking on the streets. My friend was following her. He laughs, imitating the friend. He describes my walk. In one moment, he says, she just stood up straight, very proud, and went off down that street. I thought then, what a cool girl. She made my friend look like a fool.
In the meantime, again, I am focussed, entirely, on paying my dues. I add up the rent-money, deposit-money, the expenses for the month, I make a list.
Finally, as we’re leaving, the resident family – the devil-man’s tribe, starts rolling up all their mattresses. I imagine cleaning out all the shelves. I notice that the furniture is falling apart, a little. I think about fixing it. I think about doing yoga on the rooftop.
I remember the appreciative look and speech I’d got from the devil-man. Now possible landlord. I’m not afraid of him, though. I think about him as one of the many negotiations to make, like the maze-locality itself.
As we drive out, we find ourselves on an empty road, in a deserted place. No, I say. We’re going to go back. We’ll try every possible road, figure out every possible route in and out of there. I want to know my way around this place.
The devil, you say?
It probably happens very often, but there’s definitely a spell of embarrassment and hesitation when an atheist and insistently irreligious person dreams about the devil. Worse, the dream insists that this is not a devil, not a demonic entity, not a representative evil, but the devil. Ok, you tell yourself. It’s just a metaphor. All we need to do is decode this dream, and we’ll definitely come back to the healthy state of non-believer.
Tarot Devils
There’s a devil in the tarot deck – in most tarot decks. I like tarot readings, for the pictures. Superstition, symbolism, coincidental concurrence – being an atheist doesn’t exactly shield you from those things. Here’s how most tarot readers interpret the devil:
- Addiction
- Temptation (of course)
- Co-dependency (in relationships, usually)
- Entrapment
In many tarot decks, the image of the devil is this – a horned figure, holding two human puppets on chains. There’s usually some nudity involved, because it all just comes together so well. The devil is the thing that possesses. The devil is the figure holding the chains, the chains themselves, and those two naked co-dependent humans who’re strung on the chains.
I tried to read my dreams through the tarot devil. I also tried a much simpler, more old-fashioned exercise – which was to list out for myself the people in my life, or who impacted my life, and decide which one among them was the devil. It was a list of men, because in my dream the devil was a man. Not for any other reason, really.
It doesn’t matter, though. When you get a dream like this, you get a chance to see why you made this connection at all. Which bit of you finds that wild ride, that unstable shelter?
Nightmares
Because I am not afraid in these dreams, I don’t consider them frightening dreams. Because I am not afraid in these dreams, I am frightened. My conscious life is teeming with anxiety, suddenly.
I am not afraid in the dreams, because even when he’s the owner, the landlord, the driver of the vehicle, I make the narrative. I am not in his story, he is in mine.
Possession
I don’t know if there are rules about possession, but if you do make rules, the first should be this – that if the possession is to take place at all, the person must not, at that moment, know that they are being possessed. In these dreams, the one thing I am not is possessed.
An exercise is suggested to me. Could you embody the devil of your dreams? Could you try and talk to him? I tried it out, and it’s not as scary as you’d think. It’s ok to allow yourself to be embodied if you’re still communicating. Possession has not taken place, I know it.
And yet, it happens, later, stealthily. Life seems normal until around evening, when I suddenly find my mind transported along a rainy road, on a dangerously unstable chariot, with a person at the reins who is not quite me. I don’t think about this as an event, instead, I collect images along the way. I’m inclined to picture it as a bouquet.
An assortment of flowers
Madame Bovary, looking out of her window, looking at life through windows. That moment when she wonders why everything she touches turns to rot. From where this insufficiency in life came, this collapse of everything on which she leant.
Sonnet 53, not 54, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley argue in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein – what is your substance, whereof are you made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Lucifer, morning star, a fallen star. The Biblical one, not the guy from the TV series, though who knows, maybe the two have already become interchangeable. Why didn’t he just fall to the ground, I asked. Why did he have to go underneath, into the dark? I pictured a comet, shooting out of the sky, into the earth, burrowing deep into the heat and darkness beneath.
A phrase I wrote in another article, many years ago – the crazy soul driver. The image of a car driving into a wall.
Everything that I had, the space that I had made, the links that I’d formed with the world, in the world. All my relationships. I pack this light load into three boxes, putting them in a car, an auto, a chariot. I take the wheel. I imagine driving off a cliff, or into a wall. So long, and thanks for all the fish, I say, over and over, in my head.
Despair
In Byatt’s Babel Tower, Jude Mason calls Madame Bovary a mischievous work of despair. Jude Mason is named after Thomas Hardy’s Jude (the Obscure). In that work of despair, Sue, in a moment of despair, tells her children that they are too many. So the oldest boy kills the others and then himself, leaving a note that he did it because they are too many. In Music and Silence, by Rose Tremaine, a mother tells her son that he will drive her to desolation. Desolation, he imagines, is a deserted village. There’s an old man there, sharpening knives.
In the light of the morning
On that night of gathering images of despair, desolation, crashes and burns, I didn’t dream of the devil at all. Instead, I dreamt that I was in a room full of potted plants. One of them had flowers of many colours, and I pointed them out to a friendly visitor. See, I said. I made this. It’s one tree, but it has flowers in three, four, five, many colours. I grew it. I watered the plant, which is actually the size of a small tree, maybe a ficus.
In the light of the morning, I think of this moment of possession, of this very personal devil, and I find that this is not an act of hatred, this attempt at destruction. I realise that it is, in fact, a despairing love. It comes out of mad, passionate love for life, and life itself seems to be a thing that is always escaping. This a desire to crash straight into it, to stop looking at it through the window, to jump right out of the window, crash into the earth. An incoherent desire to drive straight into the light all the way through it, into the heat and darkness beneath.
Because some stories need a happy ending
On this day, the captain admits that she might be a little inebriated, and cannot take the wheel. She decides to slink into her cabin for an afternoon nap. The ship is temporarily anchored and all is still.
In the meantime, the belugas are singing, the orcas are swimming, the day is sunny and rainy, dark and lit. Life is going on.
Postscript
A friend asks, why are you so obsessed with paying fares and bills and dues in these dreams? This is the first question I asked myself. It was answered in the dream itself, and this is probably why the dreams didn’t turn into nightmares. Paying the fare, the deposit, the rent, established the space, the apartment, the ride, the trip as mine. Thinking of payment in terms of money makes for a clear and simple transaction, and thankfully, I decided to be simplistic about this, in my dreams. It’s a clear transfer of power. Otherwise, you’re just a passenger on someone else’s ride.
