difficult situations

I was part of a group of people who were gathered at a university. We were all travelling on an escalator, up to the floor where our class would take place. At the third floor, some of the group, led by G, stepped off the escalator and continued on foot up the stairs. The rest of us wondered why when it became apparent that toward the top, the escalator became narrower and spiraled around in tighter and tighter circles, so that we were forced to step off the escalator onto an extremely small platform, at precisely the right time or we would either be squashed against the ceiling or fall off the escalator to our deaths at the bottom. We were packed so tightly on the escalator that it was doubtful that any of us would be able to make it off without harm. It was moving quickly. As I approached the platform, the person in front of me was having trouble alighting the tiny platform, so my opportunity to make it off the escalator was particularly brief. I stepped out onto the platform and only had a second to gain my balance, while the person behind me missed her opportunity altogether. I tried to then step into a chute that would take me down to the correct floor, but I felt terribly afraid and backed away. I sat down on a wooden bench and waited for my heart to stop pounding and my legs to stop shaking. I wondered if G would appear and help us. Eventually, I again approached the chute, but now, it was so small that I was unable to fit inside it. It was only the size of a standard letterbox.

Later again, I was driving down Bender Parade in Newcastle, in the neighbourhood of my childhood. My car, a big white sedan, had a problem, perhaps a crash as, although I cannot recall an accident, the bonnet and the road in front of the car were covered in sharp shards of glass. I decided to get the car home which was in the street adjacent to the road I was on. First, I had to get the car to the bottom of the hill so I released the handbrake and followed the car down the street, keeping a tight grip on the back end of the car to stop it rolling freely down the hill. There was a kind of lip protruding from the boot of the car so I was able to hang onto it. Eventually, I slowed the car at the bottom of the hill where I needed to turn it left and push it up the street to my house where I thought I could park it on the driveway. (The junction of these two streets, Bender Parade and Clayton Crescent, was where my maternal grandparents lived when they were alive.) I stood behind the car and pushed with all my strength. My shoes slipped on the bitumen and I made very little progress. Whilst I pushed, I also wondered how I would get inside the car to put the brake on when I/if I made it to the driveway. There seemed to be no solution to the problem.

planes - 25 nov

B and I were sitting on our verandah in the early hours before dawn. Our apartment must have been somewhere on the Kangaroo Point cliffs as we looked out over the city from that direction. As we watched, about sixty huge aeroplanes in a V-formation, flew slowly across the sky. The planes were all very different to one another: some passenger planes but mainly fighter planes, all travelling to the same place. There was very little noise. A second group of planes in the same V-formation flew almost soundlessly across the sky. As soon as they were out of sight, dawn broke. We knew that we had witnessed a secret government plan and felt afraid, as though the country may be going to war. As we spoke of this, we realised that we were no longer sitting on our verandah, but in the cockpit of a helicopter. We could feel the vibrations of the engine as we hovered above the city.

king wave

I was walking with members of my family along the shore. We were separated from the ocean by the ocean baths and a high wall, and yet there were rock pools and shallow water on our side of the wall. We were walking slowly, dipping our feet into the rock pools and splashing through the water. The light suddenly changed and we looked up to see a giant king wave bearing down on us behind the wall. It was enormous, perhaps the size of a five storey building. We only had time to lie flat on the ground. My uncle cradled a baby in his arms, holding it against him. I called to my sister who was behind us, to ensure that she was aware the wave was coming. Then the wave hit and we could only hope that we would survive.

my death

I went into the back bedroom at my grandparents’ house in Newcastle. The house was much as it was when they were alive, but they were not there. I remembered the fear I used to have as a child about that particular room and realised that I no longer felt that way. I lay on the bed, which faced the opposite direction to its real-life position, and conjured the sensation of being my grandfather.

The room changed and instead of the window looking out over the fence, it became a doorway which opened out onto Queen Street, Brisbane. It was about four in the morning. I could hear a pack of young men making their way down the street; they were boasting about how they had beaten up a girl earlier in the night. I knew there would be trouble and waited quietly on the bed. One of the men came into the room and slashed me slowly with a small silver knife – I could feel my hands being sliced open but I didn’t look down. I managed to wrestle the knife from him and stabbed him several times, finally thrusting the knife into his groin and twisting to make sure it wounded him badly. He fell to the ground, blood pouring out of the wound & forming a puddle around him. Someone who seemed to be my brother (although not my real-life brother) came into the room, shocked by the scene. I asked him to call the police. He hesitated, studying the body on the ground, and then left the room. Suddenly, the rest of the gang, armed with baseball bats and knifes, entered the room and my original attacker stood up. They pushed me outside onto the street and began to beat me up. I resigned myself to death and closed my eyes. Next I was a spirit. I came back to the site of my murder a short time after and watched as my brother vomited beside the enormous pool of blood on the road.

running & safety

I was running away from something—a machine like a robot. It was short but moved quickly and was gaining on me. We were tearing through the corridors of an institution that housed lecture halls, rehearsal studios, theatres and more. It was multi-leveled and vast. I realised that the robot would have trouble following me up and down stairs, so I raced into a central stairwell and ran as fast as I could up the zigzagging staircase, winding my way to the uppermost level of the complex. Once there, realising that the robot would be in hot pursuit via another means of getting to the top, I ran out onto the landing and, following another woman, I jumped over the railing and slid on my bottom down a sloping wooden structure like the tiers of seats in a theatre, minus the seating. The slide to the floor went on and on as I steered myself around architectural objects, shooting down at high speed. At the bottom, the woman and I ran across the foyer through the automatic glass doors, out across a grassy square to a building on the other side. We were flushed and laughing. I realised that I had had fun and she commented on how well I looked.

Later, I was sitting around a table with a group of people I knew and loved in a house where we all lived. It was night and we were quietly talking. A big man came in and sat with us. He had just woken up and he smelt of stale alcohol. He was hairy and brutish, his bare arms punching the air as he shouted about this and that. I knew there would be trouble, specifically something concerning me, so I did my best to quietly leave the table and exit out the front door. He realised I was going and roared after me. I fled down the stairs into the dark garden and, knowing he would assume that I took off down the street, I doubled back around the house and waited around the side behind a bush. He thundered down the cement driveway and up the road whilst I crept back up the stairs and signaled to everyone to be quiet, I hid back in the bedroom area of the house. Everyone knew that I was in danger and kept silent. My friend C was there and she took me in her arms for a moment, saying she understood, before I found a discreet position behind a bed.

Later again, I was at a party in a backyard that sloped down away from the house. There was a table set up under a canopy from where a few men were serving drinks. I was standing in front of the makeshift bar, watching a group of people sitting at a table not far from the bar, further down the slope, as well as keeping an eye on a bunch of men who were standing on the verandah overlooking the yard. There were plastic glasses of sparkling and beer, none of which looked very appealing. I was talking with the guys serving drinks when there was a thudding sound from up near the verandah and raucous laughter. One of the drunk men had thrown himself off the deck, bellyflopping onto the grass below. He got up and did it again. Others followed suite, recklessly allowing themselves to fall, even though the verandah was high above the ground. I was dismayed at their behaviour, knowing that it would end badly. Even the men serving drinks began to act badly—they became rough and unpredictable. Eventually, the crowd disappeared and I looked around me. There was only one person left, a lovely woman with dark hair. We embraced and I told her that I loved that she was dependable, that I could count on her. We walked out of the space together and went to our home. There, we each went to our respective rooms and threw open the windows which had been sealed by huge wooden doors. The light flooded in and reached the innermost rooms of the rambling house. We rearranged the furniture and made ourselves, finally, at home.

siblings

Strange dreams.

My sister and I were sleeping in a double bed in our childhood bedroom. Our bed was directly in front of a low set window. In the darkness, my brother crept through the window and lay two fully blown yellow roses on our bed, each with a card. I woke and he was disappointed that I had seen him leaving us gifts. I picked up my card and could see that it was identical to my sister’s card – both had pictures of beautiful fairytale images on the cover in purple hues. Inside the card, my brother had written a message. It was somewhat shorter than the message to our sister, but I knew that because my birthday was coming up, he would write more inside my birthday card. I was worried about him and wondered why he was bringing us gifts. Was he leaving?

I was in the home of my teenage years and it was night. I could hear someone at the front door so I opened it. A version of my sister walked straight in. Though she looked like my sister, I knew it was not her. This person was taller, bigger in every way, and seemed to be only half-present. She walked up the stairs, along the hall and into my bedroom, where she lay down on the floor and crawled under the bed. I followed her upstairs and saw where she was hiding, so I pulled her by the ankles out from under the bed. I told her that she had to leave even though I felt concern for her. I reminded myself that this wasn’t really my sister. She ran down the stairs intending to hide in another part of the house, but my brother appeared and tackled her to the ground. He too told her that she had to leave. I wondered where my sister was. I noticed the curl of my brother’s hair.