Dream d457-s: Current Beneath the Images

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had moved the work onto a canal boat. Long, narrow, dark green paint on the outside worn to primer at the waterline. Inside, the ceiling was low enough to feel on the top of my head if I stood straight. The strip ran the full length of the interior, pinned to the wall from stern to bow, forty-some images in a single line that you could only see by walking past them.

Roberto was already aboard when we arrived. He sat on the engine housing at the stern, his body vibrating with the idle of the diesel below. Lano stepped onto the deck carefully, his paws uncertain on the slight rock of the hull, then found his balance and lay down on a cushion near the bow that smelled like canal water and old wool.

"Walk it," the Dreamer said. They were outside on the stern deck, holding a cup of something hot, not coming in. "From the back to the front. The speed you walk is the speed the sequence plays."

I walked. The boat was narrow enough that each image was at arm's length, close enough to see the grain of the paper, the smudge on the ceremony fire where a thumb had touched it wet. The underground entrance. The Wireman's hands. Coast road gravel catching last light. Each one passed at the pace of my steps, and I understood what the Dreamer meant. On the workshop wall they had all been visible at once. Here, each image arrived and left. I could not see the one behind me and the one ahead at the same time. I could only hold the memory of what I had passed and the anticipation of what was coming.

Roberto dropped from the engine housing and walked the same line behind me, slower, stopping at images I had passed without pausing. I heard him tap one with his paw, and I turned. It was the coast road at the bend, the one I had almost cut weeks ago. He sat in front of it, blocking the path, and would not move.

I looked at it again. The bend. Not the road itself but the turning of it, the place where you could not see what came next.

"He wants you to stay with that one longer," the Dreamer called from outside. The boat rocked gently. Water slapped the hull. "Your walking speed was right for everything else. But you rushed the turn."

I stood with Roberto in the narrow corridor, the image of the bend at eye level, the water moving beneath us both. Lano raised his head at the bow end. The strip stretched between us and the dog, a line of images over water, and the whole boat held it the way a breath holds a sentence before the last word.