In this dream, I’m at a celebration of some kind, among a
gathering sitting around a long oval table. The only other person
recognisable to me from waking life is Eduardo (I think my memory of
this dream omits a conversation with him). I have a camera with me (a
curious camera–it looks like a still-shot camera but works more like a
camcorder, since the scenes it records, each shot, lasts some time). I
mean to capture this scene with my camera. When I lift it to my face,
however, what I see through the viewfinder is not the hall and the
table but a scene of barren, nondescript street corners. I experience
some disquiet I don’t understand. I leave the hall with the table and
walk down a long and very narrow stairwell to the base of the building
we’re in. In contrast with the relatively luxurious chamber I’ve just
quitted, the entrance is a bare, doorless space, extremely wide but not
very deep, that opens directly onto a squalid, bustling street. I find
the din outside unsettling. I may or may not go back upstairs–I have
no definite memory of this. I take out my camera and look at the shots
I’ve taken. They’re blurry, shaky and marked by an unusual luminescence,
as of fire or sundown.