I Dream of the Dead.

A recounting of an all too vivid dream which un-conceals our world right now.

I was once prescribed a remedy by a homeopath who identified, from my answers to her questions, that I dream of the dead. As it happens the prescribed remedy turned out to be highly effective for a condition that had hitherto been untreatable with conventional medicine. In short, I had tried the conventional route, (in three different ways as it happens) and it had not worked. Reasoning that I had nothing to lose, I turned to homeopathy.

And that worked.

I have since experienced many homeopathic treatments (mostly, but not always successful, admittedly) yet I never feel the need to reject what we refer to as conventional medicine because it has failed me a greater number of times.  And here it seems as though I am digressing. I am not really. This is about dreaming of the dead.

I was telling you about that thing where I dream of the dead. I tend to dream vividly at times, and yet I frequently have the all too familiar sensation of my dreams evaporating upon waking. However, every so often a dream reverberates and stays with me throughout the day. In what follows, I both recount and analyse one of those detailed vivid dreams.

I am acting, as in performative acting, with others, in a place that seems to be like an open-air theatre or an underground station. I am outside and inside. Out in the air and within a designated place. Perhaps this is London. It soon seems like Manchester. Always trains and stations in my dreams. Actually, we have already performed the play, with music and sound and we have just begun our second performance. I am not sure if I want to go through this and I am anxious about the time it is taking. I sense that I have another stint to do and am in the process of getting on with it. I do not recall who, but I am told urgently that I must hurry, now, I must go, there is no time to see to my bodily needs, no time to collect anything, I must go now.

Now.

It is important.

Interestingly, I used to do drama however I translate this performance as relating more to the two most recent academic stints I have done, along with the frequent disruptions to train travel. The stress involved in using public transport is a common aspect of my life, and yet I can link this image more to an inner and outer world. My logical brain understands this as my unconscious and conscious self; my inner and outer worlds as it were. If my analogy is right, the second performance being interrupted is notable as that is what happened. I was writing my doctoral thesis when the Covidian shutdowns occurred, and I can relate this to bodily needs and being pulled away from something I was in the middle of doing. I had cause to be in both Manchester and London at that time, so that fits as well.

The gates are closing one after the other, they are locking up, locking up the stations. I see the men locking the gates. I see them sliding the gates which are closed with a zip sound and a clang. Thinking back, they may have sounded like prison gates. I know I do not want to get locked in.

I am in London or Manchester, and it is the train stations that are closing, and I cannot get home so I must hurry, hurry to get a train whilst they still run. It is all closing soon. All around me. Closing.

I am leaving the station, and it feels busy. Lots of people moving. I am conscious of the red wall and the clanging sounds of the Gates.

Missing trains and cancellations were, and are, a factor in my life. It remains a lingering worry at the back of my mind. I suppose it will haunt my unconscious for a while yet. The closing gates seem to function as a metaphor for prison gates. However, it is easy to forge an explicit link with the name Gates who forms a figure of immense importance in the world of the Covidian nightmare. I did not want to get locked in. And there, lying nestled in that phrase, the prison slang of lockdown, a word we once only knew from American films and news stories. It is a phrase I avoid using as a rule. The red wall seems to signify, rather literally, a cohort that I am indelibly linked with. I hail from the northern working class, the so-called red wall whose votes in the 2019 British General Election enabled the propulsion of the Conservative party into power, promising freedom for the ‘somewheres’ from the globalist ‘anywheres.’ Taking place in December 2019 this was mere two or three months away from the inauguration of the Covidian cult.

I see the wide expanse of road; the massive intersections and I glean that I need to move quickly because of the danger posed to me by the cars that fly past. I am almost hit by two or three of them coming fast in my direction. There is the danger of the cars, the fear of being hit. I have dodged the moving cars coming for me.

The intersection is a wide expanse of road. I do not see the usual traffic lights, or at least I assume they are there, but I cannot see them. They are hidden or do not work.

The exposure of the road’s expanse, and the perceived danger that I face translates to the situation of coerced injections. The two or three cars that fly by, the ones that I dodge, miss me by the skin of my teeth, likely represent those penetrations that I avoided, dodged even. I recall there were three, so that fits exactly.

The usual safeguards, the controls of a civilised society here in the form of traffic lights, are nowhere to be seen. I assume they are there, but I cannot see them. The normative structures and institutions that were supposed to protect me, to regulate the potential of the speeding car to bludgeon me to death have gone. This is but one of the signs that civilisation is breaking down.

The crossroads that is not a crossroads. The road ahead is cut across by the traffic. It is busy and dangerous. Cutting across the road ahead. The dark, blackened high bridge across the road, with arches and black bricks. It is dirty with years of dirt, soot and grime. It cuts across the road I am on, but it is high above. The cutting across seems to be another way, ein Weg, (a pathway) a different direction. Getting onto that road would take us in an alternate direction.

This Weg is out of reach for climbing, and there does not seem to be a way to reach it. In the distance following that bridge’s view I see green fields, landscape and nature.

I have not reached the intersection of the crossing just yet.

The alternative road, the one that cuts across this one, that follows a different route, lies high above and ahead of me. It is supported by a high, dark sooty bridge, one that has been there for a long time. It feels Victorian. Manchester and London with their Victorian traces, and my doctoral thesis with its close Victorian contexts. The alternative road is possible then, but as yet, unreachable. I see no steps, just a difficult and maybe impossible climb ahead. My sense is that once I walk under the bridge and continue down this road, there will be no going back. But I have not reached that point yet.

The way across is hard to reach. Suddenly I notice that in the road lies a grey shape. A lump.

Upon closer inspection it appears to be like a body under a blanket. As if a tramp had set down for the night. It is not night, but it is getting dark.

When I look, the blanket is matted, it is soaking, wet, grey, sooty, thick soot, fibrous, melding at the edges with the road, it is like it is sealed, dirty, filthy. And then.

And then I know there is a dead man under the blanket. Not a tramp, not alive.

It is on the way to reaching the bridge (a word, as it happens, that reminds me of the name Bridgen) I encounter that grey lump in the road. The appearance of the grey blanket, the dirt and the soot make me think of filth and corruption. Dirty, deadly, corrupt and foul. The dreadful contents within the lump fill me with fear. This is death in its finality. Before we have even reached the crossroads, death sticks out and reminds us of its presence. An unconcealment. The dead cannot speak and yet do. Paradoxically, those that would murder and kill assume a finitude that is not rightfully theirs. The dead are silent witnesses to murder. And all that soot, is that carbon? Has the dead man now stopped being a burden upon the world, soaked as he is in soot and grime? I will tell you now that murder is not the answer to climate change. And I know that the soot is the residue of burning. This burning encapsulates the memory of that last industrial mass murder. The dream acts as confirmation of my suspicions that it is happening again. State endorsed murder on an industrial scale.

The blanket’s shape smooths out to a uniform curved coffin-like shape. Curved.

Anything might run over this and expose the dreadful contents. Something might flatten the curve.

I dread what is underneath. I cannot look.

The enormity of this discovery. This is the image that haunts me the most. The one that stays with me all day. And I know why.

I realise that I now live in a society that no longer cares about its dead.

In the dream I hover above the lumpen man. I float above the grey sludgy parcel surveying the detail of the fabric and its melding into the road. It has obviously been there for some time. It is part of the structure of the road. The Weg. It is the way things are. The wetness makes me think of emotions soaked into the earth.

I think about the homeopath who gave me a remedy for those that dream of the dead. This was the homeopath that I chose at random from the Yellow Pages. Or did I? Some friends of mine had worked with her years ago, friends who lived next door to me I do not recall them ever telling me her name. Synchronicity. This was also a homeopath that resisted the recent tyranny, that warned me all those years ago, in a coded whisper, about stabbings and not to trust them. One that posited that my ailments were likely resulting from earlier childhood stabbings. I know it cannot be proven. How could it be? Scientific knowledge is now what the closing prison Gates says it is. And proving is what homeopaths do.

Oh yes, I dream of the dead.

And maybe, thanks to one who realised that,

I do not yet walk amongst them.

For HH.