Planet Literature

Zacharias Mbizo’s Dream Worlds/8

After dreaming our way into the summer to weeks ago, today we are diving into our dream worlds in the weightless underwater worlds, where everything is quite different from the world above water.

Behind the Gates of the Waves

Immediately after the wave gates of the lake had closed over you again, you realised that you had slipped into a world that was completely alien to you. Never before had you seen anything like this.
The inhabitants here were the exact opposite of the people you were used to. It almost seemed to you as if they were a different species.Their movements were much softer, more cautious than those of their relatives on the other side of the water. Since the medium in which they lived made it impossible for them to communicate with words, their only means of expression was dance. Thus, every emotion was immediately transferred into soundless music – speaking to each other was the same as dancing with each other.
The soundless music of these dances was harmonious by nature.Not only that the common dance required an inner agreement, an eavesdropping of the foreign emotions, as it would be impossible in the ping-pong game of the word language. A bad word – if it could have been uttered – would have simply burst on its way to the recipient in this medium that endowed every expression of life with the hovering indeterminacy of the owl’s flight.
Even the facial expressions of the sea people were much softer than those of their cousins on land. Every smile led the person to which the smile was directed into the innermost chambers of the smiling person – whereas you had often enough experienced the smile as a mask that locked out the person smiled at of the innermost realm of the smiling person. But in this underwater world doors did not exist. People flowed freely around each other, and every touch involved the whole person.
With somnambulistic self-evidence they accepted you in their midst, as if you had always been a part of them. You willingly joined in their round dance, a footnote in a great, all-pervading harmony.
Like the embers that slowly eat their way through a burnt log of wood, the movements of the dancers warmed you so that soon you no longer noticed the coldness of the lake. A feeling of liberation, even redemption, spread through you.
Only when you wanted to return to the surface and did not find the way immediately, when in surfacing you had the feeling that in reality you were not surfacing at all – or rather: that you were immersing into a world that was just as alien to you as the one you were about to leave –, only then did you remember, shivering, the weathered writing above the gate to the underwater realm: Ophelia’s shores …

Another underwater dream in The Hidden Chamber, p. 34:
The City in the Lake

Image: Wiktor Wasnetsow (1848 – 1926): Underwater Tower (1884); wikiart.org