Mine.
But I am not me here.
I don't see me, I see it -- whatever is in the dream.
So the one who sees is called "you".
Here I am you.
It is getting dark.
In that space between light and dark which is neither.
You are on your way home.
Wherever home is.
There is a route, a path you always take to home.
You know it well, like the back of your hand.
You don't think about how to get home, you just go.
Part of the path is a shortcut through a terribly familiar building.
You arrive there, every time.
Now is one of them.
You arrive, first, in the carpark, loading bay.
With a big step up into the building.
Through it, you know, is the other side and the rest of your way -- home.
You enter.
And this time, somehow, the rooms have been rearranged.
The familiar way through the building is blocked.
Where you should turn left into a doorway lies a solid wall.
You turn away, looking for another way.
So there is then another room.
And you know it, even though it's not part of your normal way through.
This time, though, it is full of bicycles.
Parked, used by the occupants.
It might be a kindergarten or, at least, a place where young children are looked after.
You push through the bicycles and you feel that you will never get outside.
Again.
But there is a way through and out.
Even though you're lost, after you've moved to some kind of exit, you feel as if you knew that other exit all along.
It goes out, through a long, dark cellar.
The pipes exposed overhead.
And out, then, of a battered wooden door.
Cellar door.
Onto a green place.
A tennis club -- not usually on the way home.
Separate courts partitioned off by thin wooden lattice fences.
On the first court, women in white play and glance back, perhaps, vaguely, perhaps not at all, at you, as you pass behind them.
They are engrossed.
On the next court, something similar.
It's not clear.
Perhaps you are close to waking.
On the third court no one is playing.
There is a sign, red words on black, posted near the exit.
It has the score from an old game.
It changes to say one word that you can barely see.
Perhaps the red word on the black ground is "outdated".
Outside that court, still part of the club, still making you an interloper, is a walled grassy space.
A bit unkempt.
It runs uphill.
You stop here a while and wonder what you're doing here.
Apparently on your way home, but now here in this odd place.
But again, there is (or there opens) an exit, on the far side of this walled field.
You walk towards it and through.
Now you are in open countryside.
The grass is very long and yellow and the air is fresh.
It's not clear why, but you still have an idea that home might be, as you turn to your left, towards your right, in the direction you were walking.
Like you were in a strange part of your own town.
A part you had never visited before.
But, knowing that part, you would then know where yours was.
Having turned left, knowing home to be, probably to your right, you see ahead of you, directly in your vision, a stone bridge.
It is arched and quite small.
It doesn't actually cross anything -- a stream for instance.
But since it runs to your right, it seems to go in the right direction.
It's a little way off and so you move towards its left side, through the tall yellow grass.
As you go, part of you knows that it leads home and part of you knows that it's a mistake.
You won't be coming back.
You reach the bridge and turn right into it.
Now you see that its floor is made of dirt.
Soft, dry, grey dirt.
You start off along it.
Feeling healthy, young, sprightly.
Easy to cross.
As you go along the path over the bridge, you notice that the stone walls on either side are taller than you.
You can't see over.
The path is leading up and up.
Towards the crown.
And it is getting narrower.
There is a moment of shock when the path is so narrow that your face touches both stone sides.
And still the path goes up.
No crown.
Never down.
No other side, leading home.
But there's a voice behind you.
It says "It's OK".
You turn and there's a tall bearded man.
He's perhaps a tourist.
Maybe he has a camera.
His hair is red and thinning and he wears jeans and an anorak.
With him, beside or behind, is a woman, his wife maybe.
She is much shorter, neater, her hair a darker red and well kept.
There is no end to this path up the bridge.
Which is now just every narrow pathway you have ever walked.
It just goes up.
The three of you.
You in front and him and her behind.
It fades -- maybe you're waking again.
Who knows?
But there is then a way into something.
A wooden gate leading straight on to some stairs.
You climb.
There are several platforms along the way.
Each leads on to a room which leads on to a room.
As you stop to look on your climb, each room is filled, around its edges, with museum objects.
A room for each different thing collected, collectable.
But the urge is to go on.
Sometimes the way up is via steps -- like climbing to a bell-tower, up stone steps.
Sometimes the way is via tight wooden ladders.
On the way, everyone -- and now there are many -- stops to look around one of the many rooms of collected things.
In one room there are framed mirrors.
Not many.
Just a few.
Few and far between, because the room is large and it doesn't matter whether they're packed in or spaced apart.There's enough room.
Living room.
And in that room, the redheaded man is talking to his wife.
He's lost his air of bonhomie.
Now he's telling her how she should look.
How she should stand.
He's telling her how she once used to hold her arm with the elbow bent.
Forearm across her face.
That's, he says, how she should look and stand now.
That's the correct posture.
Look like that all the time.
Like you used to.
(As if that would stop her from being interested in me.)
Then we're all going up again, high up into this building of rooms on rooms, via its staircases, ladders and steps.
And there's something like the idea of an end.
Many people are here now.
And some are going on.
Others are going back.
Some dare.
You keep going and the last wooden ladder leads on to a platform inside a roof.
You go up -- but not towards the single edge of the platform.
On that edge you can see the insides of the final sloping roof.
Part of it is open to the sky and there are figures in that open space.
Wise men.
Some are looking straight out.
Others have telescopes.
You know that, from there, you can see the heavens.
That you are back in time.
Among ancient astronomers who are derving great wisdom from what they see.
But you know that, if you move to the edge of the platform and look through the roof-space, you will also want to look down.
And now you realise how high you have come from that single, curved bridge.
You have come to the highest place in the world -- almost.
The very highest place lies across the platform from you.
And, again, you know you will look down and see the vastness beneath you.
You can't stand that.
You make your way down.
The red-headed couple have gone now.
They're not there on the way down.
(Do you notice that they're not there?)
As you go via ladder and stair.
Wood and stone.
Down.
Sometimes climbing down backwards -- as you do on a ladder.
Sometimes, walking -- even running -- forwards, as you do on stairs.
Somewhere you stop to walk back into one of the collection rooms.
In that room there are two or three -- maybe four -- young children.
Waiting in their nightgowns, pyjamas, dressing-gowns, for bed.
You ask them -- since you have suddenly realised you don't have them -- if they have seen your glasses.
Your missing glasses.
Both pairs, the dark glasses (thick rimmed in brown) and the reading glasses (thin rimmed in gold).
Yes, they say, looking serious, but you know they're not: yes, in the next room.
The next room is full of antique spectacles.
On boxes, on tables, neatly arranged.
Rimmed and rimless -- light and dark.
None of them are yours.
Then there's a wooden cabinet with a glass door containing every kind of cigar package.
You recognise the brands from the boxes.
Thin boxes mostly.
Their spines, like books, pointed towards you with titles.
But piled up rather than arranged side-by-side like books.
You dare to open one and inside there's cream paper with a brown written message about the cigars.
Then the cigars themselves, underneath.
Packed in.
Once round, but so packed together that they're almost square now.
You close the box and go back.
Suddenly, in your hand, as if they'd been there all along, are your glasses.
But only the dark ones with the thick brown rims.
The gold-rimmed reading glasses are gone forever.
Those children in that room are bastards.
You keep climbing down.
And you never get out of that building yet.
The journey down just goes on.
There is no bridge to home at the bottom of it.
What was your bridge to home, from this strange place that you didn't recognise in the first place, is now, itself, this ancient building of wood and stone and collections that you may never get out of.
You have a dim idea of the way out.
But it's not realised.
Not in this dream.
It's like a shortcut through a building that you think you might know.
But you're not sure whether you should trust it.
That's if it ever turned up.
