1. Bus
I am somewhere, between two cities, probably coming from my parents' place though I have no recollection of that. I have to take the bus, there is no other option. I am waiting at the right place. Somewhere between Brussels and Leuven. I don't know how I got there.
The bus stops. People get in. I am the last one. I'm fumbling with my wallet. I know for a fact that I still have a ticket. I get in and look some more. I don't want the bus to leave without me, so I get in first and then keep looking, but I find it right away. I even have two tickets. I take the one with the least money on, that should be good for just this ride. I can see it only has 85 cents on it, or maybe 1.85. Anyway, just enough for this ride and a little to spare, about twenty cents. I give it to the driver. He takes it and puts it in his machine. It suffices, but I don't get the ticket back, he bins it. This is what I expected and I don't feel bad about it.
Now the bus leaves. The door behind me closes, and on my left, there is a screen which makes it impossible to go to the passenger's section. It is quite confronting to find it there. I can hear and sense that there are a lot of people on the bus already. So now, I can't even see whether there is still room for me or not. It is the first time I see such a screen drawn. It is made of a metal frame, and possibly plastic, white colours, maybe some grey. Like a Japanese screen, only very basic.
Before I take a seat, because I can't pass the screen, I ask the bus driver whether he stops at the Leuven railway station. He says yes. The moment after I realize that is not the place I was going to. I was heading for Brussels. But the bus drives in the right direction. I am relieved.
The bus stops at the Ikea (Steenweg). A woman descends. Now I know where I am, and I am going in the right direction. This is Nossegem.
I pull the screen aside or it opens. The bus is full. I take a step forwards and look for the first seat that's ready. I have a backpack with me. It is difficult to maneuver with it. The first seat is one that I have to open and click, because it is usually fold to save space. So I do that. There's a woman, probably pregnant, who sits behind me, so I can sit down too. Other people are standing. I take the seat. It is not comfortable.
2. Indian Name Giving
The same dream. Again, I don't know how I got here, but I enter an Indian building. This may be on invitation. There is this one Indian guy who is friendly towards me, in the dream I know him. All the other Indian people I don't know. They scurry about. There is something big going on. That means my friend leaves me alone for periods of time in a place I am totally unfamiliar with.
The house has many floors. There is a turquoise shine to it. I certainly entered it from the street side, through the door. Small house. Lots of people. Light. Street is part of a city, middle of a city.
My friend leaves me upstairs. At this place there are a lot of tables and they have all kinds of stuff on it in preparation for a ritual, I presume. The stairway is behind me. The place I am standing in is the right corner of the building, on my right is a window that looks out to the street. On my left is a big table. In front of me is a small table. In the far right corner is another table. The tables overlap and are positioned in such a way that you can't move them, or the stuff that is placed on it will be disarranged. The tables lean on each other. Some have cloth over them, embroidered. The table in front is a small square one, but high, it has no cloth and is made of dark polished wood. It has all kinds of tiny figurines, statuettes and precious stones and minerals, ordered in such a way that there is no room at all for anything else on the table.
I am completely stuck. I can barely move in this space. I feel rather imprisoned, surrounded by these tables. However, the Indian people can still move.
At some point, my friend gives me something and I have to carry it upstairs, there's an attic upstairs. So now I clumsily move the front table. The pieces on it are shoved to one place. The stuff that is on the table on my left is also disordered. But I can get through. I go upstairs. There's a small unsteady stairway up. It is difficult to get up. I get there anyway. This place, on top, is the highest of them all. Right under the roof. This place is especially turquoise tinted. There is no room to stand or even enter, so small is it. So I am on my hands and feet. There's a window on the right. And fancy curtains. And I place the chandelier on the sill, which functions as a shrine. I feel quite honoured that I can be here. The chandelier is something small, four or five small candles can be put in it. It is made of a silvery metal.
When I go back downstairs, I have again trouble with the stairs. They are not steady at all. They are too small, and the railing is not fast either, it is made of cord and it moves under my weight constantly. Or made of reed, or both rope and reed. On both sides, even the side on the wall that is. I get down in one piece and take back my position in the corner. I try to rearrange the pieces on the table, undo the damage.
In the meanwhile a lady comes from the same corner, all the stairs, up and down, are there. She walks straight along the back wall, which was impossible for me because of the arrangement of the tables, but somehow she can get magically passed, as if by a certain way of moving, quickly that is, the tables are momentarily pushed to the side. If I see correctly she uses a certain kind of stick for that. I see such a stick as that in the far left corner of the room and it reminds me of a maize stalk, only more simple, but it has yellow in it, looks organic, looks solid though, too, and longer than the average person.
I think, had I known that, I would not have had to move the tables in such an ungraceful way. The lady sees I'm touching the sacred objects and becomes upset. She sees I moved the tables and becomes rather angry with me and calls out to her fellow Indians who don't make such a big deal of it. But she thinks it is something like sacrilege, that a person like me touches these things, and more than that, that I moved the tables. She is not at all happy about that and she casts me an evil eye. She does not want me around.
Later in the day when the ritual is taking place, we all sit down on the floor. There is food. The Indian people sit in a square, leaning against the walls. My friend sits on my left. I am about in the same corner as before, but I'm not sure this is the same room, maybe a different level, but still high. Across the room sits the priest, he will guide the ceremony. He is really big and fat and sits on a lot of cushions. The whole room is decorated with silks and cushions. The woman from before sits on the left of the priest. She still looks angry when she sees me.
She gets so irritated with me that she can't stand it anymore and she tells the priest that I don't belong here, that I am like poison to the ritual or atmosphere. The man is quite surprised because he did not suspect me from anything. Now he looks at me. I try to look back, but because he sits so far away, and maybe he has glasses, it is hard for me to find his eyes. He keeps looking, gauging me. I keep trying and at a certain, point I do find his eyes, and they are small but bright, and brilliant, and he smiles. And I know he does not see any harm in me, but to please the lady he says he will do a ritual that automatically identifies any evil in the room. I can't remember exactly what he did but it was short, effective and rather impressive, in a spiritual way I mean. I really felt the electricity. When he did it, he certainly said some words. Maybe we all did together. I imagine there was a pot boiling in the centre of the room in which he threw something, but I'm not sure anymore. In any case I can see and feel the sparks, it is as if he pulled a slight lightning from above into himself. Then he does throw something. Maybe blue things, like sparks of the lightning maybe. And casts them about the room. When they hit persons or the aura of persons it reveals there true natures. People are startled and jump up a little when it hits them, it is that powerful, but everyone is innocent. Me too.
He makes clear that it is now proven that I am innocent, harmless. The lady is not satisfied at all, but the performance is not done yet, the priest can say more about the situation if she would like him to, so he does. And he starts to point fingers to persons and reveals them their secret names. All in Sanskrit. Some are much alike. There is one name that keeps coming up, for different people. The priest has this second sight because of the spell he cast. He points at my friend. He points at me. He says my name. I know that means that I belong here and that I am an important person, someone that is allowed to be in his presence. The name sounds like Prabumanji. I don't know it. I had somewhat expected to hear I name I was familiar with from the Hindu mythology, like a reference to my own name. That would have been Abimunja, what I expected, but it was something with Praba or Prabu. Immediately I tried to memorize the name, but I was still in the dream and it therefore did not work that good.
There was a section in the ritual where we chanted, maybe after the name giving. And for some reason I had to take the lead, although I didn't know the words, nor the melodies. So I tried. The melodies were the hardest. I could remember words somehow. So it all worked out in the end. At that moment is was already night.
+ Before the priest gave names, he was pointing and saying: god, goddess, god, goddess. Or whichever was appropriate for the person in question. More often he said god, but when he pointed to me he said goddess, and I recognized the truth. It is probably the Master you are connected with. Or the image of him. He said it in Dutch (godin).
+ Before the priest gave names, he was pointing and saying: god, goddess, god, goddess. Or whichever was appropriate for the person in question. More often he said god, but when he pointed to me he said goddess, and I recognized the truth. It is probably the Master you are connected with. Or the image of him. He said it in Dutch (godin).
3. A Measure of Loneliness
Dark. In a room, but can't see it, so rather close up type of dream. I am standing, almost naked. Two people measure me. I know them. They are close friends. The woman talks, the boy does not. They take my measures. For example about the waist. The woman says: I can measure your loneliness. None of us had expected this. But it is what she reads from the tape measure (meetlint). They go down. She measures my knees, or tries to, because she ends up the upper part of my legs. Again she says she measures a kind of loneliness in me. When she says it I have to admit that I have a certain kind of loneliness in me that I was not aware of or that I suppressed. The boy agrees.
4. Ash Wednesday Seven
I get home. Home is a place in an apartment, very high up in a building block, but a spacious place, although we only occupy a very small part. We look out over the city from so high up. I first cross the public room, which has a seat or toilet. I know in the hallway there is a lift, although I can't remember using it. It is dark there. It is dark in the rather wide public room, which should be the living room. But these days everyone is living in the corner room, so that is where I go. I enter. This is supposed to be my parents' place.
Inside is light, large windows. On the right is a table, desk. On the left a sort of saloon. Everyone is here. I was the last missing. Parents and brothers.
I sit myself at the desk. There is a guest sitting there who is visiting. He is an older guy. I recognize him. I've seen him in the shop. I know him from there. He knows who I am too. He is mix of two people I know from the shop, Mr Dv and the other one I don't know his name, but he has grey hair, is taller than me and usually buys a newspaper. They both have grey hair, so the person sitting in front of me also has grey hair. But he also has a seven written in charcoal on his forehead. It being Wednesday in the dream I figure that he must just have come from mass and gotten the Ash Wednesday cross. Of course this does not fit, because Ash Wednesday is passed already, and he has no cross but a seven on his forehead. So I figure the number must refer to the week of lent we are in. In that case it is almost over, because I assume there are eight.
I look at it, but don't say a word. He does not bring it up either, nor do my brothers who think it strange as well.
Soon enough I leave the place because I have to go to the bathroom. I suppose I needed to go all along. So now I am in the earlier room again. There is a big black chair, very spacious, plastic, with wholes, like the plastic is woven, that kind of design. So you can look through it. It is quite comfortable if you sit in it. It is also the toilet. I sit down first. Then I stand up and unzip and water down the chair, because I honestly think it is a toilet. I can even see underneath the marble or ceramic part for leading away the water. My pee is yellow, so I must have been drinking too little, my body is still in need of detox. There's a lot of pee coming from me. Then I start to see, that the pee is leaking away from the pot, it is on the floor, and the pool becomes bigger by the second, but I can't stop peeing, there's still too much coming, even if I try to stop, it doesn't work. Now I have a problem. But I will just ignore it. It means I have been peeing through the black plastic net all along, on the floor.
After that I stay in this room, but go to the desk in this room which is at the other end. There's more light there, and it is dawning and I can see through the large window.
At some point I'm at the computer and this is a very old computer but it looks like it still works. I tell my brother N who is with me at that time, that he could copy the 'spellekes' file or directory and then we can play all those old games from before. He tries to do that. In the meanwhile, I try to look for old files that I still want, maybe I can copy them to my current computer. I look into one or two of these old files, but when I open them there's nothing there but an empty page. Yet I know there must be something, so I try again and again. And in the end I find something but it is only little, like two words at first, which are actually codings of much more information, and then later more words, like a questionnaire. While I'm working on this computer, watching its screen, I might be in another place of the room, this fragment may also have happened earlier in the dream.
So when I am in the so-called public dark room, at the desk, I am at first alone. Later my brother will come. But for now I am looking out of the window and I see pictures of mountains. These must be pictures of when I was in India or Tibet maybe, because these are the Himalayas. These are beautiful pictures of mountains. And I look if I can see myself, but I don't but I do recognize other people on the picture. I pick one photograph, all of them are floating before my mind's eye somehow, like an inner gallery, and this is about a beautiful part of the mountain, of which I have a strong memory. And I gaze at it intently, and I try to be there again by doing that. I know that dreams can work like that, so I do that. And it kind of works. I start to see the scene, but still from a distance. It takes too much effort to get in there for real, so I leave it after a while.
Then I finally get to the work that is waiting for me at the desk. And that should be recording my dreams. So I start getting my papers in order and start writing or preparing for it.
That is when my brother comes and asks me something, he wants me to do the same for him. Recording, but I suppose interpreting too, his dreams. I think that is okay and I can do that. So I will help him first with it. I get ready. He sits on my left. I tell him I have to prepare for it first, which in this case means I have to chop herbs. Either coriander or nettle, or a herb that is both. When I start doing that, the fresh herbs are lying there I get to work to cut them fine, then other people enter, from the window. A whole class of younger kids, maybe teenagers, but still young, girls and boys, come in, and ask me if I can interpret their dreams, or even record them for them. I sigh a little but take on the challenge. There's one particular little girl that takes the lead in asking. She's on my right, across the table, the other boys are on the left, behind my brother. But they will have to wait, I'll first do the work for my brother and then for them.
While I am busy getting the herbs for my brother cut, the dream ends.