Snipped Off

It was too late really, but a last drink seemed to be essential before the trek home to a cold flat. Anyhow I had to tell Alice about my weird dream. Perhaps the atmosphere of the pub and the murky street outside played a part too. After the clamour of the day things sometimes become dreamlike as life finally goes quiet. Well in my world they do.

“Did I ever tell you about my spooky dream?” I asked Alice as she carefully placed those last drinks on the table. She is always careful like that. Tidy too.

“Which one? You seem to have loads of dreams.” Alice seemed tired as she slumped back and took a sip of that last drink. She wasn’t really listening but Alice doesn’t listen much. That’s why I like telling her things.

“My dream about the railway journey,” I explained.

“Clackety clack through the storm? I’ve heard it.”

“No - not that one. No - in this one it’s snow. Miles of untrodden snow – and trees, miles of trees. A train ploughs its way through a vast snowscape - like a Russian landscape. Endless snow studded with fir trees.”

“A puffing train?”

“Well yes - I suppose it was a steam train.” Alice always picks up on these things so I have to explain the details but I don’t mind.

“So you recently watched a movie like Doctor Zhivago or something. That’s what dreams are, just memories of stuff.”

“No, not Doctor Zhivago – nothing like that. I was all alone in the carriage and it was almost dark outside. A strange purplish dusk it was, with long fingers of moonlight pointing at me through all those black fir trees. And it was seriously cold - although I didn’t feel the cold because it was outside. I felt it through the carriage window though – that unearthly alien cold. Like being on another planet.”

“It would be cold. You know why? The clue is the snow – I’m surprised you didn’t spot that. And what was Doctor Zhivago doing while all this snowy angst was going on?” Alice is cynical like that. It’s deflating sometimes.

“I told you - it wasn’t Doctor Zhivago. I haven’t watched it in years. Anyway there was hardly anyone else on the train and every now and then we passed an inn or a house or just a shack and they all had a light in the window. Or sometimes we would come across a station with an empty waiting room.”

“And did the train stop so you could nip off and grab a coffee?”

“No but the train did stop at every station. Shadowy people appeared from nowhere and got on while some got off and faded into the snowy wasteland just beyond the station. More like shadows than people they were. Sometimes the train just stopped in the middle of nowhere then started again.”

“So what made you remember this version of the train spotter's favourite dream? Because it sounds so boring I’d have woken up for a nice drink of water to assuage the tedium.”

“I remember it because it was my subconscious telling me something important.”

“About Doctor Zhivago?”

“No – forget Doctor bloody Zhivago. It wasn’t that at all.”

“Sounds like it to me.”

“No it was telling me something much deeper.”

“What?”

“It was telling me about luck - or something like luck. The train was taking me somewhere, but I didn’t actually know where I wanted to go because we can’t see into the future. It didn’t matter if I stayed on the train, got off at one of the stations and waited for another or if I decided to get off in the middle of nowhere and make my way to one of those inns with a light in the window.”

“Or if you simply wandered off through those dark trees among the fingers of moonlight, where the only sound is that creaking noise when you tread on fresh snow.”

“That was an option too.”

“Not a good option I’d say, not without survival gear. Or did you have that?”

“That wasn’t the point. The point was – well anyway I think it was all about the unknown. I had no way of knowing where I was going and what I would gain by staying on the train or by getting off at one of the stations. The only thing keeping me on the train was inertia, but even there I was trusting the unknown.”

“So – sounds like a fairly commonplace homily packed into a spooky dream. I wish I had dreams like that.”

“That’s not it either. The dream was telling me more – that life is essentially spooky. We pretend it isn’t and we pretend we know where we are going but we don’t. There are journeys we take and journeys we could take but don’t and we can’t tell which is best.”

“I don’t see what’s spooky about that. It’s life as we know it.”

“The spooky aspect was the trees and the fingers of moonlight.”

“Okay so it was visually spooky. I can see that.”

“The trees and the fingers of moonlight – that was the unknown watching us. Like an eye. The eye of reality adapting itself to whatever we do, reaching into our lives. Most of the time we gather together, turn on the lights, go about our business, go to the pub, make some noise and pretend it isn’t there but it is. It’s there in the street outside this pub, waiting for us to leave.”

“Well yes… I’m sure life seems a little spooky if you insist on seeing it like that.” Alice shivered theatrically and glanced over her shoulder at the empty bar.

“The spooky aspect is that we can’t stay on the train and get off the train. We can’t do both.”

“What? That’s supposed to be spooky? It isn’t spooky it’s nonsense.”

“Of course it’s nonsense, but that’s the spooky aspect too. The point is that if I decided to stay on the train – well that was it. All the possibilities open to me by getting off the train – they just disappeared. Gone forever.”

“So?”

“Until the train moved off again, being able to get off and do something else was part of my human potential. It was real, I could have done it so easily. Get up. Open the door. Step onto the platform. But reality just snuffed it out. Those fingers of moonlight – they were just like ethereal pairs of scissors.”

“Now that is spooky.”

“It is spooky. A rich seam of alternative possibilities all gone. Part of my unrealised potential until it was –

“Snipped off?”

“I suppose so.”