Unconfirmed Reports

In my dream last night I discovered that all our night-time thoughts and feelings are recorded somewhere as plain-text files in a giant database. If we go to the correct location to access these files in the morning, we can check up on correspondences between our own night-thoughts and those of others, thus establishing the truth of human relationships in our daytime lives.

This man was not in the dream

So I went to the place for accessing records. It was a large brown office building in the centre of a big city. The foyer was very luxuriant, with a high ceiling, chandalier, and antique wooden floorboards. I waited a while, along with a range of wealthy businessmen. While I was waiting, a television showed the morning news, which featured a government announcement. The government described how they were going to restructure the taxation system, because they need to make it “more flexible”. I knew that the government in this city were notoriously corrupt, so I took this as nothing more than an excuse to do something scandalous.

Eventually a female attendant unlocked and opened one of the doors leading out of the foyer, letting people pass through into the night-records area. The wealthy businessmen all went through first, and I walked through a little behind them. The attendant stopped me and said, “If you are interested in teaching work, you need to be able to prove that you are at least 18 years old.” She then turned her back on me, and continued into a comfortable waiting room where the wealthy men were gathered.

I was very annoyed by this, being discriminated against due to my clothing and appearance, for what seemed like it should really be an open public service. In anger, I suddenly ran at the woman, to scare her. At the last moment I ran around her, grabbed a an expensive-looking and ugly brass ornament from a side-table, then turned and ran back out along the corridor. The ornament was an angular, abstract shape, vaguely reminiscent of both a Möbius strip and the notoriously messy logo for the 2012 London Olympics. But it was made of solid, precious metal, and seemed to be a sort of antique.

Fleeing the scene, in a few moments I reached the end of the corridor, where the doorway led back into the high-ceilinged foyer. To try to prevent my escape, one of the staff had lent a fine old double-bass precariously in the doorway. The assumption was that I would stop, or at least pause, not wanting to damage the instrument. But instead I barged right through it, throwing it to the floor of the foyer. A single security guard had been waiting near the door leading out into the street. He was already moving towards me. As he approached, I gave the double-bass a solid kick, so that it skidded across the floor towards him. This was enough to distract him, as he knelt down in concern for the instrument. I ran past him and into the street.

I started running along the pavement to my left. It was a covered pavement, arcaded with columns. There were shops and other entrances all the way along. Within a few metres, another man stood in my way. He had seen that I had just come running out of the prestigious brown building, and he wanted to ask me about what sort of tupperware they had inside. I pushed him out of the way, and pointed at the ground, shouting untruthfully: “there’s tupperware on the ground!”

I ran on, and fearing pursuit from the security forces, I took a sudden turn up a concrete ramp, leading into a building that looked something like a car-park. By now my moment of rebellion back in the night-records building had caused a sort of general panic. The brown building itself was on fire, and young people in the street had a wild, incendiary look in their eyes. I came upon a young man at the top of the concrete ramp - he was surrounded by piles of large black rubbish bags. He was grabbing these bags and hurling them around, in a rage, ecstatic at his own destructive power. One of the black bags landed near me, and I picked it up and threw it back at him, hard, knocking him into one of the piles of rubbish.

Still I ran on, going up a few stories, then out onto an open walkway with a view across to another building nearby. Another angry young man was on the edge of this building - in fact he was hanging of the edge by his hands, enjoying the danger. I leapt across the gap and thudded into him, pushing him back inside the building, and leaving myself now hanging from the concrete edge. The street was very far below, an unsurvivable drop. There wasn’t really anywhere I could go. I realised that I could, perhaps, swing my body forwards and grab onto another concrete pilon using my feet and legs. But I knew that I wouldn’t then be able to hang from my legs - they wouldn’t be strong enough. But I also realised that I didn’t care: I’d ruined everything now, and there was nowhere left to go. So I swung my body forwards, grabbing the other surface with my legs, and letting the top edge go with my hands. For just a moment I hung there by my legs, then I dropped, falling backwards through the air.

It was a long way down, and for a second or two I felt the wind rushing past my back. I was tense all over, fear physically gripping my body, waiting to die. I breathed in sharply to brace myself against the impact, but then when my lungs filled, my body stopped falling, and was suspended, perfectly still, lying on my back in mid-air.