Dream d488-s: Forty-Four and the Wall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer had cleared the projection wall. They had taken down the cork panels, the pinned reference sheets, the calendar that had not been turned since November, and the wall behind all of it was bare plaster, off-white with faint water stains in the upper corner and a nail hole where something heavy had once hung. The projector sat on the editing table, pointed at this wall, and the sequence ran in a continuous loop, each print appearing for six seconds before dissolving into the next.

We sat in the two chairs we had pulled to the back of the room. The lamp was off. The only light was the projector beam, which threw a sharp rectangle onto the plaster and filled it with the images one at a time, each one the size of a window, larger than I had ever seen them, and the grain of the prints showed at this scale, and the texture of the plaster showed through the grain, and the two surfaces merged into something that was neither photograph nor wall.

Roberto had climbed the bookshelf to the left of the projection. He sat on the top shelf, level with the upper edge of the projected image, his body in shadow, his eyes catching the light each time the image changed. From where he sat he could see both the wall and the projector, and his head moved between them in a rhythm that matched the dissolve timing, six seconds of looking at the image, then a glance back at the machine that produced it, then forward again to the next.

Lano lay beside my chair, his body against the chair leg, his face turned toward the wall. The projected light moved across him each time the image shifted, painting him briefly in the colors of whatever print was showing, the blue of the underground, the gold of the coast road, the orange of the ceremony fire. He did not move through any of them.

"Watch the twenty-third and twenty-fourth," the Dreamer said.

I watched. Twenty-three was the entrance to the underground, the stone arch with the fern growing from the top, shot from below. Twenty-four was the coast road at the point where the path turned inland, the ocean disappearing behind a low hill. Between them the dissolve lasted the same six seconds as all the others. But something happened in the blend. For a moment, the stone arch and the low hill occupied the same space, and the fern at the top of the arch became the grass at the top of the hill, and the dark opening beneath became the road curving away, and the two images were the same image, or they had always contained each other and the sequence had simply placed them close enough to show it.

"That is not something I did," the Dreamer said. "That is something that was always in the material. The sequence only had to get close enough for you to see it. Twenty-three and twenty-four could not be separated by more than one position. Anywhere else in the grid and the echo disappears. Here it speaks."

Roberto descended from the bookshelf. He crossed the floor through the projector beam and his shadow fell across the wall for a moment, a dark shape moving through the dissolve between images twenty-nine and thirty, and when he passed, the two prints seemed closer than before, as if his crossing had pressed them together. He jumped onto the table beside the projector and sat facing the wall, his back to the lens, watching what the machine made of the material he had spent weeks walking through.

The loop continued. The sequence played again from the beginning. Lano's ears shifted with the light.