Death's Dream...

...every once in a while I dream of my death. Don't we all? Can't spend all our sleeping time in complete oblivion, or else in some incestual turmoil despite Herr Freud's prognostications.

This then my latest death's dream:

I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.

Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.

The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.

But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.

Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.

So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.

At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.

There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.

I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.

But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.

No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.

So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.

Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.

One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.

To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.

The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.

As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.

Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?

I am inclined to believe the latter.