118 / 208
118
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