Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/1

As previously announced, today we are setting out on a new literary journey on Planet Literature. This time, it takes us to the land of dreams. Our journey begins with dreams that deal with the nature of dreams.

Midnight Dance

At midnight, your thoughts begin to flutter restlessly through the one-eyed sky. In their search for nourishment, they indiscriminately snatch at any apparition that entices them. In the somersaults they make, they become unfaithful to themselves and merge into those many-faceted images that they reject during the day. And yet, the wild pirouettes they perform are closer to you at this moment than the soldierly order to which they willingly submit in the light of the day.

Only at dawn do your thoughts become calmer. Silently they drift towards the shadowy net that the forest has spun on the horizon and dissolve into bizarre shapes. When you open your eyes, they slowly sink back into you.

The Dream Hunter

At dusk, your dreams step out of the darkness of the forest. They drink the twilight, they bask in the scent of memory herbs that the wind carries down from a land beyond the hills.

You watch them revive, now that they no longer have to hide, now that they can unfold undisturbed by the lattice of tree trunks. It almost seems to you as if they were growing, like shadows reaching out into space in the slanting sun.

Time and again it also happens that your dreams join with other dreams. They romp around each other, dance around each other, jump around each other. Sometimes you feel as if the way they encircle each other, the way they branch into each other and spread out over the fields in ever new patterns, is creating something new, a dream that encloses all dreams within itself, a dream home that offers shelter to all dreams.

So you stand there and dream yourself into the herd of your dreams. But of course you know that your idyll is fragile. It is always threatened by the dark eyes of the hunter who watches the herd from the undergrowth. He envies your dreams their peace, he cannot bear that their freedom is so much greater than his, which is always strapped into the harness of reason.

And so it happens not seldom that a shot shatters the idyll and your dreams fly back into the belly of the forest. Repeatedly, one of them is also hit and spills its blood into the dewy grass. Then the hunter, with a bored look on his face, descends from his high seat and strolls leisurely through the meadow to give your dream the finishing shot and disembowel it.

As you mourn the death of your dream, you comfort yourself with the certainty that the hunter, by killing the dream and subjugating it to his purposes, will never obtain what made the dream a dream. After all, a dream that has been killed is no longer what it was. And so the essence of a dream will always outlast its death.

Another dream about dreams can be found in The Hidden Chamber, p. 32: Rain Butterflies.

Image: Harsh Patel: Moon (Pixabay)