Nightmare's Moat

There’s not so much difference between beginnings and ends as between sections in the middle.  Difference in both time and substance. 

I first entered the graveyard that Blessed Brian once described in an email sent at least twenty years after he told me about visiting it for the last time.  In deepest England, but, of course, no part of England could have secrets amid a modern world of communication.  Prying eyes were not Brian’s alone. Even so, I did expect, in some strange way, that I would be one of very few people to have seen virgin stone crosses and pillows and angels and shield-shaped memorials, all entirely unweathered and a joy from which to take rubbings... in an otherwise very weathered churchyard.

I was staying with a fellow student, one doing a PhD in the use of dreams in literature.  He told me that a nightmare was not the dream-in-itself-that-one-imagined-seeing-while-asleep but the area that surrounded it, a sort of moat of wordless thought.

I told him that I didn’t think in words, in any event. He was surprised.

“Doesn’t everyone think in words?” he had asked, just that very morning.

“I assumed everyone thought as I think I do.  In images, visions ... that, by listening to you just now, I am now forced to turn into words.”

There was now shock on his face.

“Well, let’s try an experiment,” he said.  “Think of an illness that’s been in the news lately.  How do you think of it if not in words?”

“Swine flu?”

“Yes, there you are.  How else would you think of it unless it is in words?”

I shrugged. “I only put my thought into words as a matter of communication with you.”

Thus, ‘nightmare’s moat’ meant nothing to me as an expression of words, but I eventually saw the swirling thoughts that circled the ‘eye’ of the dream-storm or nightmare, saw it when I tried to think back to a particular nightmare and to put it into words for his benefit.

“The graveyard was a perfect vision and matched exactly what Brian had told me in his email.”

I hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Well, the headstones were perfect, as if freshly embedded that very day. The numbers and letters etched cleanly with the chisels I could actually see glinting as the workmen or gravediggers carrying them walked across a nearby bridge on their way home for supper.  Some stone construction of memorial and effigy was cantilevered as if providing a balcony where the dead could stand.  There was a stone candle with a stone flame upon its salustrade.”

“Don’t you mean balustrade? A balcony has a balustrade.”

“No, what I saw was a salustrade.  The shape of a devilish imp sculpted as bent over acrobatically to form the front of the balcony.  Somehow, I knew in the nightmare that imp’s own name had been given to the construction he now formed.”

My fellow student’s face was now itself frozen as if in a state of being sculpted even as I continued to look at it. My mention of the stone candle and its flame must have caused this phenomenon. Words were more powerful than real thoughts.  And we stared at each other as if involved in an out-blinking game that boys used to play in the schoolyard.  Joined by slowly solidifying gazes between our eyes.  A sort of retro-causality of inverse melting.  Thoughts that cannot be put into proper words.

And something clambered upon us so as to stand on our backs, till we eventually couldn’t feel it standing up there at all.

The last sense to vanish was hearing. A rubbing noise.

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