It is dark except for the low light of the lamp, and something rumbles nearby, in a fissure between seen and unseen. Then a screeching note, followed by wingbeat near the window across from where I sit. Noting how I dreamed again of you in trouble, and me trying to get somewhere in time. But where. Like so many of these dreams, I can only describe its geography as an urgent atmosphere of too-bright light, noisy with crowds and a sense of executioners above us. As I run to find you, there is a scope somewhere, a running form in its crosshairs, and the crowds are rivers of us, and for each other body in the crosshairs I am part of the crowd in the desperate dream where we feel the insignificance of this flesh against the thing we mean to prevent in time.
And what do I do now with this sense, but sit and spin in it, in these fifteen––no, ten––minutes before I have to move again, out again to where the screeching flies, to the place of urgent details and not enough time? I note again the feeble voice crying stop, how it sounds like one that started crying a long time ago, long enough to lose the urgency of the initial scream, near expired like the droning whine of an infant soon to fall exhausted back to sleep.
Vivid, frightening dreamscapes that reverberate long after I read the final sentence.
Thank you for reading and liking my Richard Ford book review. Rare to get feedback these days. I’ll be back.
Stephen, thank you so much.