Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

ne afternoon I have a dream that’s so strange I wake up with a start. The images are unusually clear, the experience so vivid and strong that I go on lying there with a wide-open, fixed gaze until it gets dark. I dreamt I lay trapped under the ruins of a collapsed house, I was half-suffocated and close to death, under a huge pile of stones but with an air pocket close to my nose. And I wasn’t alone, there was someone else in the ruins, just as half-dead as I was. When the house collapsed, we had managed to get hold of each other’s hands, we lay separate and hidden by the rubble, but our fingers were intertwined. I didn’t know who the other person was, but I had a feeling that it was a woman, and that there was something familiar and close in the contact between hands and skin. We held on to each other for a long time and signalled via squeezing and tweaking that we were still alive – a reassurance and encouragement for both of us. But after a while the other person’s squeezes grew slacker, colder, the hand responded more weakly and less frequently to my squeezes, and finally stopped altogether. I tried to stretch the other person’s fingers, make large movements with my hand to get a reaction, but stones and the position of my arm made it impossible. Finally I had to accept that the other person was dead and that I was completely alone in the ruins of the collapsed house. O

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