Meditation II: Oneironaut, by Quentin S. Crisp

Meditation II: Oneironaut

O, children of a future age,
Reading this bewildered page,
Know that in a former time,
Dream, sweet dream, was deemed a lie.

But children of the future age, you are not separate; or only so because you know there is no future. And so you sit inside the circle, and I must begin my address across time with the O that cancels time, dialling zero with nothing on the non-existent, telepathic oneirophone. And who is the oneironaut, and who is on the ground, I do not know.

The dreams began in caves - stalactited space capsules. In future, as past, physical travel is obsolete, only the transition of the present moves. I see the cockpit cave where future and past are a single sky of Dreamtime, viewed through a scanner of rock and paint, navigated by serpents and rainbows, steered by song.

There are not two serpents, only one. Watch their writhing closely, and the double image is resolved into single. There is only this rock. There has only ever been this rock. We have not moved an inch. Where can we go? But only close your eyes and a jungle of possibles leaps upon the screen of nothing.

There are no controls upon the console of this rock, but only close your eyes...

The sand is the same in this box, but the patterns change. The colours are continous, but the dream-clouds rearrange themselves with greater ease than mercury, in an endless series of complete transformations, night after night.

I am the oneironaut. There seems to be a problem - a malfunction somewhere. I am aware of distance. I drift in space and since I must breathe, a tube connects me to the base I cannot see. Only through this thin tube, twisting into the distance where it disappears, do I live and breathe. Suddenly, I realise, as any oneironaut must, that this umbilical cord is a serpent.

It writhes, and sinks its fangs into my stomach, injecting the necessary venom. Without this poison there is nowhere to go. The scales of the serpent are a rainbow. They change colours like the pigment of a cuttlefish, flashing a virulent code whose language will be translated in the body of the oneironaut - translated by pain and fever. Now my helmet fills with images of dream. They slide across my visor, like a film upon a screen. I see nothing else. This helmet has become a magic lantern, suffocating me with alien landscapes, other-dimensional skies, pavilions of telepathic conference where invertebrate dignitaries of dream federations recallibrate my concepts and perceptions with wreathes of synaesthetic incense, geometrical dances of universal pandemonium, biological catacombs connecting worlds, fireworks of synchronistic superclusters building to the crashing of a fractal wave, Disney deities promulgating abundant cartoon universes, primogenitors of strange aeons who are mere bacteria in a microcosmic slime culture beneath the dewlaps of primogenitors, which wheels-within-wheels break when the Tao becomes not-Tao into strange aeons curving to vaster cycles that become once more the Tao, from which there crawl and slobber the primogenitors of strange aeons,

At this point the message was interrupted. There is only crackle from the receiver.

The skeleton of the oneironaut, suited, drifts through space, the dreams still playing in flickering colours, an aurora borealis of beyond, across the screen of the visor.