Sunday

It’s always strange to turn up in someone’s dreams not behaving like yourself.

Must draw more, women shaking blankets out of the window, etc.

It’s always strange to turn up in someone’s dreams not behaving like yourself.

The first sequence of a night’s dreams, more often than not cloudy and meaningless, which is set in your kitchen or the launderette or some other intimately familiar location—aesthetically rudimentary, narratively forgettable, atmospherically claustrophobic, as if you were wriggling through a tight series of passageways or tunnels—must be endured before the Dream Proper can begin, a necessary part of preliminary sleep in the same way as every time you leave your house, you are obliged to weave through a network of unskippable streets whose characteristics have been completely erased by your familiarity with them, until you get far away enough to see something you have never seen before, and you break out into the open fields, where the animals are.

Dreaming better these days. Remembering them better. As long as I don’t move a muscle. The other day I dreamt that I’d discovered hundreds of flies in my room, and I felt like there was nothing I could do except wait for them to die.

Last night my dad sent me a link to a horror short about an Airbnb host who transforms a young man into a goat. You could tell he got turned into a goat because he had a problem with his eye, it was all milky, and the goat, when you finally saw it, had the same problem.

Reading anything is better the second time. It is an ordeal to endure a piece of writing when you do not know where it is going to end up. There are hundreds of avenues it could have gone down, horrifyingly or incomprehensibly, and it flirts opaquely with so many of these entryways before choosing only one of them. It then becomes obvious that the untouched avenues are only horrifying and incomprehensible because they are shrouded in darkness and have not been illuminated by the elaboration of the passage. Nevertheless, it is comforting to know that it did not go into these dubious areas, and it is good to identify in retrospect which small “stumps” of information were red herrings and dead ends that you were justified in glossing over. This paragraph too could have gone down hundreds of different avenues, horrifyingly or incomprehensibly, but it did not, only marking out this one idea, and if you read it again now you will be comforted by the knowledge that it did not say the things it did not say, and you may gloss over the small “stumps” of information which were red herrings and did not go anywhere.

The justification of every decision from the perspective of Paradise is equivalent to a “re-reading” of the history of the world informed by the perfect conclusion through the obliteration of time. On Earth we stumble through a series of never-ending passageways, but in Paradise, time-bound events will not have to be experienced in moment-to-moment fragments but will be able to be observed as complete objects. By compressing time into a lower dimension, we will encompass it as it currently encompasses us. Time-experiences will become manoeuvrable trinkets, and these objects will fit inside other objects. Pain, being viewed outside time, will become a hard and wavy shape that we can turn over in our hands like a piece of coral. On Earth, trinkets of pain pass through our bodies, invisibly, like asteroids, and we produce the voice of the trinkets as the miniscule grooves on a record produce a melody. In Paradise, we will be able to put these objects away, in their cabinets. We will not be subjected to these things in the way we are now, but will be able to peruse them at our leisure.