Story: Oneiromancy, IV

(Part O , III , V)


This time he was flying, high - far too high - above a desert that was shimmering under the heat of a relentless sun in the pale blue sky. The dunes were barely perceptible from this height, merely smudges on the otherwise featureless expanse from horizon to horizon. The speed was incredible as he knifed through the air, and if it weren't for the inevitable dreamland physics in action he felt he would have fainted due to lack of breathing mere moments into the experience.

It was calm up there, in the great expanse, and for a while he forgot about it all and enjoyed the experience. Where he was going, he knew not, nor where he had flown from. Between a few minutes and a few days later the man slowed and then stopped high above what seemed to be a featureless hill of sand projecting from the arid plains. The world convulsed.

The shaking went on for ages, and the sky itself seemed to shudder. The sun vanished and the moon rose, and the moon vanished in turn to be replaced by three new moons and a ring of cosmic debris emitting a ghostly light. The convulsions settled and in startlement the flier saw a face in the hill of sand beneath him. Defiantly feminine nose, eyes and mouth could be seen in the dunes and valleys beneath and the suggestions of ears and a noble brow and chin.

The eyes opened and for a moment looked about wildly before seeing the man. Disconcertingly, the blue of the pupils had no tinge of sandiness and a sense of serenity settled into them as she gazed upwards and he down. The mouth opened, but only a mighty wind emerged, and then a horrid void pulling the man down in a great wave of suction. All power of flight faded and he plummeted down, down, down into the abyss that was the sandy mouth until finally he vanished from all Earthly sight and was gone.

The great sandy face wept sandy tears and seemed to shiver and quake in its own feeble structure, looking for a way out back to reality. A way to tell what she was trying to tell. The blue eyes of sand blinked, faded to yellow, and then the whole facade crumpled back into the desert, as if no-one had ever been there. The sandy desert continued, an archetype buried in the great common unconscious of the people dead, born and waiting.

The dream time faded into nothingness and somewhere out in the wide world of space and time a man awoke - and a woman - both confused and disoriented, and both with a nagging sense of things badly awry. If only the man had had time and thought in their own private shared desert to look up, and gaze upon a now sculpted debris ring, he would have seen something extraordinary: "Help me".

And then they went about their business for yet another day.

To be extended...