Apocalypse Dreams (Part 1)



Apocalypse Dreams (Part 1)

Last night I had another apocalyptic dream.

This time we stood huddled in a square, facing a Baroque building with statues that Arabesqued and a roof that blended into the sky. The sky was in two halves; the bottom was a deep orange like a Great Fire and the top was slate-grey.

We weren’t huddled for any sinister reasons, just tourists at a landmark trying to remember the architecture. An event was taking place inside the building – one of note, not just any old metaphysical event that begins and ends with indeterminate boundaries and a causality of infinite fractal complexity. It was a ‘happy’ event befitting of that Baroque building: an Opera or a Molière. They may have been wearing masks inside (we couldn’t see).

I remind you that this was a dream, so it needn’t follow a linear logic or conform to the laws of physics. I was transported to Spain, where the newsreaders in my head told me without words about the situation that was unfolding there. Grainy footage of indistinguishable bodies, pale blues and deep browns: the colours of contemporary horror (no blood or limbs, just clinical fields of colour and the snake-that-eats-itself contortions of Sarah Lucas or Francis Bacon).

I became unsure whether I was in Spain or England. This square had the unfamiliarity of a foreign landmark, but I sensed that Catalonia was remote and hostile. I was displaced and uncomfortable, being surrounded by people I didn’t know while my friends laughed inside the building, and unable to distinguish between home and elsewhere. Europe pulsed and this anonymous square felt like the epicentre of its throbs.

I noted a plane. It’s always a plane – the bringer of bombs, the unmistakable rumble, the sentient bird that has travelled and can fall.

All noise was sucked from the square and, for a moment, there swelled a sense of awe.

‘Those inside might exit.’

‘Something has ended. Something has begun.’

Great plumes of sand and concrete rose like dusty fireworks.