In the dream, Max and I are
driving through desert terrain. The landscape is littered with animal skeletons
and industrial debris. It’s daytime. The sky is a deep, fathomless blue.
Music is playing, a humming,
the sound of some spectral choir, like the sound that accompanies Dave Bowman’s
journey into the infinite in 2001. We
drive for what seems like forever, accompanied by this discomforting sound.
Eventually, we approach a
highway sign that reads “X – 100 Miles”.
I know, in the dream, that the
X represents something terrifying, but I don’t know what it is.
It's only a crazy dream, kind of funny even. Still, for reasons that I can’t
explain, though I never stop trying, this dream, that X, affects me profoundly,
haunting me for years afterwards.
Clearly, one might jump to the
conclusion that it is a dream about anxiety. It probably is. The future is
breathing down our necks and we are confounded by all of the choices, afraid of
what might happen.
But it feels like something
else. It feels like a voice calling out a warning from the future, or from some
other side of this reality.
One of my favorite recordings
around this time is Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays, which contains Fairport’s own idiosyncratic take on
Blind Willie Johnson’s creepy “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground”,
retitled “The Lord Is In This Place, How Dreadful Is This Place”.
A desolate, mournful slide
guitar accompanied by haunted, wordless voices, it isn’t so much a song as a
ghost, a spiritual presence floating through the speakers, passing from one
netherworld to the next.
It sounds to me like a
remembrance. Not necessarily - or only - of things past, but also of the
future.
Or, maybe, something missing
from the future. An emptiness. Things about to not be done. Or things about to
be done that shouldn’t be. Consequences looming.
The future, man, is an
oppressive thing. Forget what The Beatles said, tomorrow always knows.
