Dream d482-s: Parked Somewhere We Cannot See

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were working in the back of a van. The Dreamer had borrowed it from someone, a white panel van with no rear windows and a floor of ridged metal that was cold through our shoes. They had placed a piece of plywood across two plastic crates to make a table, and the prints were laid out on the plywood in a single line that ran from the back doors to the partition behind the driver's seat.

The van was parked. I did not know where. The back doors were closed and the only source of illumination was a battery lantern the Dreamer had hung from a hook in the ceiling, the kind meant for camping, which cast a diffuse white glow that flattened everything and made the photographs look like they were printed on the same surface as the plywood.

Roberto had found the driver's seat. He sat behind the wheel with his paws on the dashboard, looking through the windshield at whatever was outside. I could not see what he saw. The partition between the cab and the cargo area had a small sliding window, and through it I caught only a slice of Roberto's profile and, beyond him, the lower edge of something green. A hedge, maybe. A field.

Lano lay against the back doors, his body spanning the gap where the two doors met. If anyone opened them, they would find a dog first. He was warm against the metal and his breathing fogged slightly in the cold air of the van.

"This is the smallest the sequence has been," the Dreamer said. They sat cross-legged on the floor, the plywood table at chest height from this position. "The courtyard was the largest. The cinema was dark. The stairwell was vertical. This is compressed. The images are eight inches apart. There is nowhere for the eye to rest between them."

They were right. The prints touched at their edges. The ceremony fire bled into the underground entrance. The coast road pressed against the stranger's staircase. The gaps I had learned to read, the spaces where the third meaning lived, were almost closed.

"What happens when you remove the gap entirely?" I asked.

"Try it."

I pushed two prints together until they overlapped. The ceremony fire and the Wireman's hands. The fire burned over the hands. The wires glowed in the flames. The two images merged into something that looked like a single photograph of something that had never existed.

"That is collage," the Dreamer said. "Not sequence. Sequence needs the gap. Even a small one. Even this." They pulled the prints apart by a centimeter. A thin line of plywood appeared between fire and hands. The two images separated. They became themselves again, and the space between them, barely wider than a pencil, held the same charge it had held at three inches, at a full arm's length, at the width of a bar counter.

"The gap does not need size," the Dreamer said. "It needs existence."

Roberto shifted in the driver's seat. Through the sliding window I saw him turn his head from the windshield to look back at us, checking the work, then return to whatever was outside. Lano pressed closer to the doors. The lantern swung gently from its hook, which meant the van was moving, or the wind was pushing it, or the ground beneath us was not as steady as I had assumed. The prints shivered on the plywood. The centimeter gaps held.