Dream d474-s: Someone's Curtains, Our Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had moved us into a borrowed apartment on the third floor of a building I did not know. The owner was away. The furniture had been pushed to the walls, a sofa draped in a sheet, a bookshelf turned to face the plaster, and in the center of the cleared living room the Dreamer had set up the editing table, the lamp, and two chairs. The apartment smelled of someone else's life, soap and cooking oil and the faint trace of a perfume that had settled into the curtains.

Roberto explored the apartment with professional thoroughness. He opened the kitchen cabinets, checked behind the bathroom door, pulled a drawer open with both paws and examined its contents, a collection of rubber bands and take-out menus, before closing it and moving to the next room. He was mapping the space the way he mapped every space, establishing its borders and exits before settling into the work.

Lano chose the hallway. He lay in the narrow corridor between the bedroom and the living room, his body blocking the passage, his head oriented toward the editing table. From where he rested he could see both me and the front door, and his positioning felt deliberate, as if he had assigned himself a post.

The sequence prints were spread across the table. Forty-one images, but the Dreamer had added three more since the cinema screening. I did not recognize them.

"These are not from your journey," the Dreamer said. They stood at the window, adjusting the borrowed curtains to control the daylight falling on the table. "These are from the archive. The harbor in fog. The spiral staircase. The cracked bowl. They rhyme with your material and they are going in."

"They are someone else's."

"They were. Now they belong to the sequence. The sequence does not care who carried the camera. It cares whether the image earns its place."

Roberto returned from his survey and jumped onto the table. He walked directly to where the harbor photograph had been inserted, between the underground entrance and the coast road, and sat on it. Not next to it. On it. His small weight pressing it into the table.

"He does not agree with that placement," the Dreamer said, watching him. "Neither do I, now that I see it. The harbor is too similar to the coast road. Two bodies of water in sequence. The eye slides."

They removed the harbor and replaced it with the spiral staircase, a stranger's staircase from a stranger's building, photographed four years ago. Roberto stepped off the table and onto the chair, then the floor, satisfied. The staircase between the tunnel and the coast made the tunnel feel like it led somewhere vertical, and the coast felt like arriving at the top of something rather than the edge.

Lano yawned from his hallway post. The curtains moved in a draft from the window the Dreamer had cracked open, and the light on the table shifted, warming the prints, then cooling them, then warming them again. We were working in someone else's home with someone else's images in a sequence about a journey that was mine but was becoming less mine with each cut, and the Dreamer adjusted the curtains again and said, without looking at me, "Good. The less it belongs to you, the more it can belong to whoever sees it."