I kept a dream diary a few years ago. It seemed to be a dialogue with my dreams. Of the dreams I wrote down several years ago this is my favourite:
I find myself wandering among the bridges and copulas of an ancient, heavenly city all cunningly and beautifully made of carved light grey stone. It is clean, solid, designed in a high unique style, spare and modest. I wander over a vaulting stone bridge which overlooks a cloudy chasm. On the other side, the left bank, broad lawns front endless contiguous mansions and apartments made of stone. People, the residents I presume, lounge and congregate on these hillside lawns, perhaps awaiting an evening fireworks spectacle over this city of eternal and triumphant peace.
I wander past them onto a path through a grove of trees that shade the mansions. I pass pumpkin-sized stones crudely carved, as if by prehistoric tribesmen, into the rough shape of skulls. It strikes me that I am dreaming and that therefore I have a responsibility for what I experience here. The path descends and the wood grows thick so that now I am almost in a tunnel. There in the path up ahead is a giant weasel as big as a bear. He could be dangerous, an enemy; but I think if I greet him with love he will not harm me, so I order my thought into positive compassion. He passes me by harmlessly.
I reach my own apartment. It is luxuriously panelled and wainscotted in dark wood. I seem to be in a cosy, professorial den, windowless and heavily curtained, lit yellowly with staid old electric reading lamps like a classical library and furnished with black padded leather armchairs. There is a massive polished stone fireplace.To the right of the fireplace I see that patio doors give out onto the lawns outside, so I’m not underground after all.