Analyst

This a genuine dream from some years ago. I described it at the time in three single spaced pages which made it too long for Like Minds. I hope that this reduction preserves the flavour.

FOR THE ATTENTION OF MY ANALYST.

In a particular dream I am much younger, married with no children, and living with my wife’s parents and her younger siblings. The house is located where my own family once lived in Station Road Dargaville and yet it is not the same house but this I do not question. What I do question is the strange T.V. that I find in the lounge on returning home from work. My wife will not give me a straight answer on its presence nor will the others. Eventually, it comes out that our T.V. has broken down during the day and been taken to a repair firm. The set is mine and T.V. repair is my trade and yet they have taken it to a rival firm. There could be no clearer indication of their poor opinion of my abilities.

I storm out of the house and down the hill to the road. I head toward town and just past the boundary of our property find that deep flood water has filled a dip in the road and the wide adjacent drain. Two Maori youths pass me on a motor scooter and seeing the flood attempt to jump the scooter over the flooded drain onto the higher footpath. Both riders and scooter disappear under the muddy water and yet I can still hear the engine running. Even in dream I know that this cannot be possible. The youths emerge dry. They remount the still running scooter and head on into town.

I don’t know how I got through the flood but now find myself, as I believe, in Mangawhare on the southern extremity of Dargaville at about where Mt Wesley should be. In its place I am shocked to find a two hundred-foot-high polished-stone tower with a rounded top like a silo. It is too impossibly regular to be anything but magic. This is not the Mangawhare I have known and I also seem to have slipped in back in time. There is a large black building that at first I take to be a town hall. It is a square building except for the left front corner which is indented. Its entrance is there. I then realise that it is a grocers’ shop which is good because I need supplies. I am going to hide from the world on my unreal mountain.

I should explain that this mountain was once part of our waking reality but when it ceased to exist it also became a ’never-was’ in that there can be no memory or record of it except with me. I had discovered and climbed this mountain in previous dreams and had stayed several times since in the house that is built on a shelf near its crest. I now recall those visits in a sort of movie-style flashback. When the mountain was real, a university had two women entomologists stationed up there. There is a water supply and the taps run clear. There is also a generator to supply power. Everything stays in prime condition because, being now in an unreality, nothing can age, the season cannot change. Even the view cannot change. From the front verandah a large city can be seen on the plain far below, the city that was at its foot when the mountain was real. I cannot know what this city is because I always leave the mountain exactly where I began to climb it and the mountain is now located anywhere that I begin my climb.

The store that was so large on the outside is relatively small on the inside. This is possible in dreams so that I do not notice any disparity. It seems that the owner is failing in business and the shelves are almost bare. In spite of that, this pokey store still employs three grocers all with pencils perched on their ears. I need something to drink and all that remains are some soft-drinks. What sort is uncertain. The liquid is clear and the unlabelled bottles are shaped like the glasses of kerosine lamps. The tops are not sealed having me wonder how the bubbles stay in and the dirt stays out. Clearly not something that I can take up the mountain. They’d spill. Then I notice that one bottle has a cork although I am sure that it had none a moment before. “I’ll take that one,” I say pointing. But when it is brought down to the counter the cork has disappeared.

I can see no food on the shelves. “Have you any biscuits?” I ask and one of the grocers comes from behind the counter and goes to three wooden sea chests on the floor behind me. They are secured with locks. “There might be some in here,”he says but when he opens them they contain nothing but a few slabs of the sealing wax that my mother used for sealing preserves during the war. Their wrappings show them to be ancient stock. “You won’t sell too many of them,” I say.

I can buy nothing here and in consolation, the owner offers me a free beer and leads me around behind a low partition where I find a crowded noisy bar. I have been unaware until then that this noisy crowd was so close and the low partition was, until moments before, the ceiling-high wall with the shelves that held the soft drinks. I am concious of both anomalies. I decide not to accept the drink and leave.

It seems that I am not to climb the mountain on this occasion and I find myself apparently going back toward Dargaville. I am not walking and not running. I am going too fast. I do not appear to be riding anything. I seem to be just flowing along and don’t see this as strange. But the Northern Wairoa River should be on my right. I know that. Yet instead hilly, dry, over-grazed sheep country crowds the road which is dead straight, metal not seal, and disappears into a distant haze. I realise now that I was not in Mangawhare and am probably not now heading back to central Dargaville. I pass four green-furred man-sized creatures in a paddock shaking fists and making loud threatening noises. These are the local version of Big-foot or Yowie but I know that they are really local high-school lads paid to dress up. This is their holiday job and is done to entertain the tourists. Today the only tourist is me but then, as with all dreams, I wake up.