Unfolding

Photo by Kien Do
image courtesy of unsplash.com

I had a dream that I was tiny.  I don’t remember how I knew it, but to me a fingernail would be as wide and tall as the broad side of a barn.  I was floating or sinking down in something dim and red, and there was a shape coming up towards me, and it was me.

“Hello,” said a woman who was standing near my head.  As I got close I saw she was about my size.  She was near my cheek, which curved up in the dim light like some unrestrained piece of sculpture, a peach the size of a skyscraper.  “My name is Pauline,” the woman said.  I said hello.

We entered through my outer incisor.  Pauline pulled a catch on a small door that swiveled open in the big white wall, which from this close looked like it was made of white tiles, like a bathroom wall, or the space shuttle.  Inside it was dark and very hot; I wanted to go back out, but Pauline took my arm and we floated went further in.

“Can I see my visual cortex?” I said, trying to muster some enthusiasm for the project in a smalltalk sort of way.

“Follow me,” Pauline said, but when we hit the bloodstream through the clotted root of the tooth I sensed that we went down, and not up.  I wondered what tiny I could do that the big I would feel.  I expected to see red blood cells floating by like jelly donut shaped cars in a classroom video, but it was mostly just a wide space.  We moved quickly, and it was hard to make anything out; I tried to count the turns, but quickly got lost.  Pauline had let go of my arm, but I stayed close.

“Where are we going?” I asked, beginning to feel bored.

“Here,” Pauline said, and we went through the wall.  It gapped like a huge red wicker wall of licorice and tucked itself together behind.  We were in a big white room with walls that looked like the underbellies of a thousand octopuses wrestling on all sides.

The walls were heaving in and out on all sides, and there was something in the middle of them; a dark grey pearl, or maybe a round steel ball.  It was moving this way and that, pushed around by the ball.

“What is this?” I said, feeling revolted.

“This says what you want,” Pauline said serenely.  I didn’t understand what she meant.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“This is not a journey of discovery,” she said, and we sank into the writhing white folds.  I held by breath before we went through, but it wasn’t bad, they felt like very smooth blankets, and a moment later we were on the other side an moving again.

We weren’t in a blood vessel this time, we were moving through what I thought might be a nerve, but I’m not sure.  It’s hard to remember, I think we might have been beams of light.  We were moving faster than ever, and I couldn’t see anything but rainbow edges around things.  I remember feeling disappointed that this wasn’t at the end of the dream; it seems like being a beam of light should be the last thing.

We came out in a huge space, wide and wide and round.  I could just get a sense that the ruddy wall we were floating near curved inwards way above our heads and way below.  There was a light shining from somewhere but I couldn’t make it out.

The light was making a shape in the air above my head, but I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.  The air seemed to be in motion and the shape in the light just wouldn’t take to itself.  I thought I saw if for a second, it looked like a curved double scratch like a simple drawing of a wave, or of a bird turned upside down.  But that wasn’t really it, because I was only seeing it from the side.

“This is your light,” Pauline said.

“How do we get over there?” I asked, gesturing towards where the light came from.  I was thinking if I got closer to the source I could see the shape.

“This is not a journey of wisdom,” Pauline said.

“Huh?” I said.

We moved on.

I think we were in the bone, or rather that we had become part of it.  I felt like a splinter, glued in among a thousand other splinters.  One piece of sand, melted with a million others into the long bend of a single shape.  But we were still moving.  We moved with the rate of growth, but it seemed to take years.

I slowly moved through a hundred different shapes, as conscious of them as a plant is of the sun.  Plants don’t have nerves, do they?  But they’ve got something in them that reaches for the sun.  Does that something feel like anything?  Maybe we wouldn’t be able to feel it, nerve endings are so much louder.  But it has to feel like something, right?  What about a stone?

The shapes flowed through me and I was them, but then they passed on.  I felt what made me think of me moving away.  I didn’t like it.  I didn’t know where Pauline was, I assumed she was embedded in the bones somewhere above me, but she didn’t say anything.

The world dwindled around us, everything was getting smaller and smaller.  At last we separated from the shapes, like pop-up figures cut out of the dim paper in the dark.  We were standing on some last invisible surface, looking down at one tiny little constellation, barely a handful of little shapes, ringing off one another in the dark.

“These are words,” said Pauline.

I nodded thoughtfully like I knew what she meant.

After a minute I got an idea, looking at the little bones. 

“How can I make them better?” I asked her.

But the idea flew away, and I wrote this story to try and remember what that idea was, and it didn’t come back.  It hasn’t landed.

So, “This is not a journey of transformation,” Pauline said.

“What’s it for, then?” I said.

I woke up.