I dreamed the Revelation of St Mathew.
I dreamed it as literally as it is possible to dream something so non-literal. It was visionary. It was a vision.
It was sublime, visually and atmospherically sublime, in a way that no dream of mine has ever been sublime. It is also the first time I have ever had a second hand dream. It was Mathew who dreamed the Revelation of St Mathew, he was there first. I don’t know how I gained the right to be there.
In the dream, at least, I gained that right because I was on a tour. Like a rainbow that has its foot somewhere and can be climbed, the Revelation was a site, somehow, a kind of meta-real Ephemera that you could visit, and its entry had been located in an area of provincial France. There were tours there. We were on a tour that was visiting the Revelation – you could enter and climb the Revelation. And so the Revelation was less a dream-narrative (time) than a dream-space (eternal) – a space/place you could move through, move up through, though only on a particular course, like a track, I suppose the course was the order in which the thing was originally narrated.
The air was sun, sublime, mist-light, God-light, it was like being inside some immensity God had exhaled, and it was somehow unlike anything I could have imagined – it was something an amazing painter had imagined, vast beyond all vanishing points – vast, bright, haze, outside the limits of vision.
The Revelation of St Mathew – a tour. You went on, you went on the path with your tour group and I was with my family of four and we went on in the group – and it just kept on thrusting up, you would be on one level and feel its altitude more heavenly more Alpine more exalted than any air you ever breathed and yet then you would thrust up to the next, and somehow it looked the same only perhaps brighter, vaster somehow, that view down from the bridge of stone over limitless distance without fringes, out to clouds, distant cliff-bridges partly made only of sun or I don’t know, I can’t describe it, and you could hardly believe it when you walked on a little and were shot up into the next tier, and felt an even more incredible altitude, sublime, like breathing so that you yourself were being breathed, you were air, and you could see better, further, than ever before, you couldn’t help looking, and it was like for once gazing was enough, gazing was consummation itself, there was none of that hunger you get with a beautiful view to consume it. It was enough – and you went on, up, thrusting up to the next height, the next incredible expanse, with a space beyond expanses.
And light, light, light silt-sifted through clouds, expansive light, immense, yet not bright, heavenly in a sense of that word I can never communicate, like being breathed, like everything – enough, enough, enough.
Somehow a sense of sunlit stone structures not quite real – whatever you were working on (and on the way up, underneath, a vague sense of dark beings, a kraken, a spider-thing, hovering – shadowed – beneath the suspended stone path we were climbing, dali-esque somehow, material/immaterial, suspension itself – these creatures that were seen only when we had to go down the last part, through the bottom few levels, on the way back (of which, see ahead). You saw nothing of them on the way up, there was only a dark hint of them at your back, like eyes on your back.
And then the summit level, the top level, where you could see the golden gates, the something beyond that you saw and somehow didn’t see at once, and yet it was there, it was not vanished in any sense. And strangely, here you felt the altitude was clarified somehow, clarissimus, somehow more ‘real’ and although now at some insane height beyond all human knowledge (for you did not have to walk all the steps up, you were somehow vastly shot higher up through levels though always on a path, never aware of this shooting or how it happened over such distance) – anyway, although you were now at this height, strangely, there was water now, a human distance below, perhaps only ‘virtual’ water and, in the disance, a light-faded glistening image of a bridge somehow reminiscent of that lucid yet misted early morning view of the golden gate bridge only you knew it must somehow be much vaster, infinitely vaster, and so distant you weren’t quite looking at it, yet you were. Bridge mist god light.
The mass queue appears of all the worlds dead ever in a mass going up the ramp to the gates and we, the tour, couldn’t get to that last part of the promontory (some real metal fence holding us back perhaps). We were invisible or irrelevant to the masses – the order of their queue was determined by god, not first come first served (for there is no time in heaven).
Had I gone beyond the golden gates, I would have seen the numbers described in the revelation, in their strange manifestation, I would have seen holy numbers, I would have seen the sheep-eyed thing, etc.
Real speedboats were going under us on that water. Speedboats under us, real, with that clarified hard loud feel to them, hyper-ordinary somehow, like being back on earth with men shouting, young men, French men I think, shouting with the speed of it! And then we were on a train going down – we were on a sort of rollercoaster train only it was not a ride it was infrastructure – we were on it going down from the level of heaven and it started fast and it went faster, faster, accelerating madly to pick up an incredible speed that seemed terminal, I can’t describe it I thought my face would fly off but it didn’t hurt but I thought we would all die – extreme speed. The driver of this train was like a taxi driver – a man of few words, not friendly, bored of his job, not comforting, and we sped sped sped down not quite til we were back at the level of France but til we were perhaps within airspace that the French government administered, and we were alive, my family, and getting out of the train, and my mum tried to say something friendly to the driver but he was just sick of his job, not friendly, and we were going along on our shaky legs waolking back with our amazed faces turned to each other amazed smiling like we’d really got full value, and there was this mundane exhausted Euphoria as we went down the last part, through the bottom levels that now looked dark and enclosed like stone, stone caves and we went down on ladders through holes in the floor, waking the kraken-creature and other insect-monsters and spectre-things that guarded the doors from the shadows, moving once then keeping still, keeping their every sense trained on us. I felt a little fear, excited Euphoric fear, so that my bowels were weak on the last ladder and I felt like a baby crapping in its pants.
I realised only later that I somehow had crapped in the piece of cardboard I would have to use for the next three weeks to wrap the kebabs we were having for dinner. FUCK, YUK. We were back in the tour accommodation now – with a panelled, muffled, low-ceilinged carpeted fake teak cruiseliner feel to it, and a hum underneath us - and I went to the loo and wandered into the wrong room and went back out (I think a guide made a pass at me) and then I was eating my dinner at a high table and these admiring kids, cricket-fan type boys, were gathering around me because they’d heard of me via my sister’s websites. It was hard to get rid of them. Then there was a talent night.
At this talent night I only saw one act, prematurely performed – it was a pair of precocious American children, boy and girl – whose act was to try to get chocolates out from under a huge heav rusty iron birdcage – but when I looked I could see the chocolates were really little parcels of cremation ashes, compacted. The children spoke in horrible childish/unchildish trained-actor voices.
Then I was at the bottom of the cliffs of coogee, a mad wild version, and it was gone...

i can hear, through the office wall, a currawong.

(the wall behind me. there are other things to post here, but they must wait)