Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/6

Life crises are a very fertile breeding ground for dreams: they open the door to the chamber of the unconscious. Sometimes they show us ways out of the crisis – but unfortunately they sometimes also intensify our gloom.

The Hyacinth

To your own amazement, you remained completely calm after you were buried alive. You instinctively felt that you only had a chance of survival if you henceforth drew all your strength from yourself – and that you had to use this strength as sparingly as possible.
And so time passed by without you perceiving it at all. The darkness around you always remained the same, only the soil constantly felt different. Sometimes it was firmer, sometimes softer, sometimes it was completely cold, then again it seemed a little warmer.
Once it took on such a delicate, crumbly consistency that you thought someone on the other side of the world was stirring up the ground. If you hadn’t been caught up in yourself, you would have called for help. But soon the crumbs of earth tightened around you again and enclosed you like a stone tomb.
One day, however, the moment came when the earth finally began to free itself from its torpor. What had previously appeared to you as a uniform mass now revealed itself as a mosaic of millions of lives that poked and tickled you from all sides.
You yourself now felt a force awaken within you that was stronger than you, a force that began to burst open your life withdrawn into itself. Fervently you hoped that someone would finally look for you and free you from your dungeon. You knew all too well that if you had to stay in your cave any longer, your own strength would consume you.
But then something happened that you yourself would never have dared to dream of: From within you, from the center of your own being, a sword sprang forth that cut through your chains and broke open the darkness above you with irresistible force.
As soon as the tip of your new existence pierced the earth’s crust, the arms of the sun finally pulled you out of the darkness. The breath of the wind freed you from the filth of your dungeon and fanned you with the fluff of the clouds to moisten you.
Of course, even after that, there were days when the frost of despondency threw you back on yourself. Sometimes you even wished you had never stepped out of yourself. Then again, you stretched out so boisterously towards life that you wavered, fearing that you might be pulled to the ground by your own impetuous growth.
But finally all impediments came to an end. At last you were fully reconciled with the world and branched out with it again. Nourished by this trust, you succeeded in unfolding freely and exhaling the fragrance of your newfound existence into the sky.

More Crisis Dreams in The Hidden Chamber, pp. 57 – 63:
The Robe of Melancholy
In the Web of Fear

Picture: Helma Petrick (geb. 1940): Silence (1998); photography by Jan Schüler (Wikimedia commons)