Dream d481-s: The Trees Did Not Look Away

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had set up the projector in a courtyard behind a block of flats. The wall facing us was blank, four stories of cream-colored render with no windows on this side, and the projector sat on a milk crate in the center of the yard, its beam cutting through the evening air at a slight upward angle so the images appeared taller than they were, stretched by the geometry of projection.

There were chairs. The Dreamer had brought six folding chairs and arranged them in a loose semicircle facing the wall. Five were empty. The sixth held Roberto, who sat upright in the seat with his front paws on his knees like a patron at a recital, watching the blank wall before the sequence began.

Lano chose the ground. He lay in the grass between the chairs, which had not been mowed recently and came up around his sides so that only his head was visible, a white shape in the green, his eyes on the wall.

Two trees flanked the projection surface. Plane trees, their bark peeling in patches, their branches bare enough that the beam passed through them at the edges, throwing branch shadows onto the wall that mixed with the projected images.

The Dreamer started the sequence without announcement. The ceremony fire appeared on the wall, enormous, three meters tall, and the branch shadows crossed the flames like dark veins. The fire burned through the branches. The branches held still in the fire. Neither cancelled the other.

"This is the version with witnesses," the Dreamer said. They stood behind the projector, their face lit from below by the spill of the beam. "The workshop is private. The cinema was private. This is not. Anyone in those flats who looks out a back window sees the sequence tonight. They did not choose to see it. They do not know what it is. They will see it anyway."

A window opened on the second floor of the building to the left. Someone leaned out, looked at the wall, watched for perhaps ten seconds, and went back inside. They did not close the window.

Roberto turned in his chair to watch the window, then turned back to the wall. He had registered the viewer. He returned to the work.

The underground entrance appeared. On this scale, at this height, the tunnel mouth was large enough to walk into. The branch shadows gave it roots, or veins, or cracks, and the image was no longer a photograph of a tunnel. It was something organic, growing on the wall, something the building had produced from its own surface.

"You cannot control who sees it," the Dreamer said. "You cannot control what the trees add. You cannot control the window. The sequence is in the world now. The world will do what it does."

Lano's ears moved, tracking a sound from the street beyond the courtyard. A bicycle passed. The coast road appeared on the wall, vast and luminous, and the branches drew a second horizon across the sky in the photograph, and Roberto sat in his folding chair in the unmowed grass and watched it all with the composure of someone who had always known the work would eventually leave the room.