Dream d455-s: Where Strangers Will Sit

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer took us through a side door I had assumed was a closet. It opened onto a corridor, then another door, then the cinema. Small. Forty seats in five rows, the fabric worn to a shine on the armrests, the floor sticky in the way that never fully cleans. The screen was down, white and slightly wrinkled at the bottom left corner where the tension had gone.

Roberto walked straight down the center aisle and jumped onto a seat in the third row. He sat upright, facing the screen, paws on the armrest in front of him. Waiting.

Lano stayed close to me, his nails clicking on the concrete floor between rows. He sniffed a seat, then another, cataloguing who had been here before us. His ears kept swiveling toward the projection booth behind the back wall.

The Dreamer went up to the booth. I heard them threading the strip through the gate, the familiar click of sprockets catching. Then the beam cut through the dark, catching dust, and the screen filled.

The images were the same ones from the workshop table. The underground entrance. The Wireman's hands on copper. Coast road gravel. The ceremony fire. But projected at this size, in this room built for watching, they were not the same at all. On the table they had been objects, things I could pick up and hold to the lamp. Here they were weather. They moved across the screen the way cloud shadow moves across a field, too large to see from inside.

I sat in the second row. The seat beside me had a small tear in the upholstery, foam showing through. Someone had sat here enough times to wear a hole.

The Dreamer's voice came through a speaker I could not see, slightly distorted by the room's acoustics. "This is not for you anymore. You have already lived it. This room is for the people who have not."

Roberto turned his head and looked at me, then back at the screen. The ceremony fire filled the wall, six feet of orange, and for the first time I was watching it as a stranger would. Without the heat. Without the faces I knew. Just the image of a fire, someone's fire, in a sequence that had been made by hands I would never meet.

That was the shift. The material had stopped being mine. Not taken, not lost. Graduated. Moved into the space where it could belong to someone sitting in any of these forty seats who had never walked my road or descended my tunnels or stood in my ceremony.

Lano settled at my feet. Roberto cleaned the armrest with one paw, as if preparing the seat beside him for whoever would come next.

The projector clicked on through the strip. The screen kept showing what I had given away.