Recall that dream you had—you know the one:
It’s the one that looks an awful lot like a pastel painting. It’s dripping, dark, frantic. You make your way through a harsh maze or set of mazes in a some kind of circusy mess, dilapidated with cluster-fucks of brilliant and soft color, like an eight-year-old just got a new art set. Tents grow tall and shrink down around you, breathing almost more heavily than you do. It’s dusk, or seems to be. The sky is orange and black of an uncertain ash (colors rip right through it), and you start running—without an inclination as to why or from whom. The colors spin together in a dizzy terror, while you trip by rusted metals and broken mirrors.
Making your way through the endlessness of the odd objects surrounding you, you begin to hear the pulsating wail of an accordion, and lone drum beats. It starts getting louder, faster. It joins wind instruments and percussions ever picking up louder, faster. It’s the melody found in a lack of melody. The time is strange—but then again, everything is strange. It’s slick, what you’re hearing. You’d like it if it didn’t frighten you to the bone, but you still don’t really know what to make of it. Regardless of which direction you move, it just gets louder.
There’s a man in a hat, but you don’t know which man. He’s holding something (or maybe nothing). You move on, but he doesn’t leave you, not really. You’d swear he’s staring at you, but you can’t see his eyes. The sounds you hear swell and shrink like the objects in your periphery, like one long breath from a very large lung. He’s making you aware of the sad looking hand-puppets at your feet. They’re broken and like everything else in this place, a macabre impression of a sad operatic clown.
You move on, for lack of any more comforting action. Things pick up: it gets more dizzy, they start melting together. You can feel it, the crescendo of the piece—if this is art you swear you’ll never lay eyes on another piece again. The things spin you into the distinct feeling that you can’t see or that you can see too much and it gets harder to move. The man is gone now and you realize too late that he may have been a good thing. Something strikes you still, silent, and you have the distinct feeling of falling but it’s hard to say in which direction you fall. The music picks up and becomes disjointed and now seems to control your destiny. You plead to it, as if to make your case, but nothing gives. The images and sounds blend together in a very colorful strait-jacket as you finally give in to the gravity of whatever this is. The hyperventilating couldn’t possibly get worse, or at least that’s what you thought. You’re choked and scared until tears blur what little and bizarre sight you had. You make one last grandiose grab at something before realizing it’s really too late, and you’re played off by one accordion set to one marching beat. You savor it, because for lack of anything else it’s contact by collision, and you’ll take it.
Waking up, you can’t really shake the feeling of terror. Even if it wasn’t real, it’s hard to say what is. You still have the dizziness, which frightens you, but the world is no longer moving with you, and the colors and surfaces and faces and floors don’t bleed together anymore. You wonder why and how that was manufactured by your rather healthy imagination, but it’s not something you want to think about. You have no choice but to move past it and keep moving, and you find it hard to elude the feeling of being watched, at least for now.
Come to think of it, I guess you could call it a nightmare.
-Drew
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