Saturday 23 March 2013

Shadowy Parkland - Another Dream of Woodstock Drive

These frequent dreams about returning to Woodstock Drive, where I lived as a teenager, continue.
Last night I was walking up that road -grey sky, empty light- approaching my old house. The street was very different, and I noticed to my horror, that a number of houses opposite where I lived had been demolished and replaced by some kind of car showroom. I looked to my old house, and discovered that there were a number of extensions to the side of the houses.
I found myself in a nearby park - some patch of overgrown tangle that was inimically connected with Woodstock Drive, but that does not exist beyond the confines of the dream. This shadowy parkland operated as some kind of hyper-metaphor for the shadows of Woodstock Drive (and I have written before about the problems with shadows I had in that house, both in these dreams and when I lived there).
The parkland was dark - shadowed by overhanging trees, and split by numerous small streams and brooks, that had the feel of something industrial, like a sewer overflow. Some of these brooks were full of thick black mud that had the effect of warping the air around them. I was trying top balance on a line of bricks above these mud channels / rivers. The bricks began to crumble, and the hardened skin of the outer mud broke up to show the wet sucking danger underneath. There was some kind of miniature cataclysm. I found myself ont he ground - perhaps on the banks of a proper river. I remember looking over flowing autumnal water at the opposite bank. The bank had been ripped apart, and I could see into a miniature corridor that was part of the hyper-park's sewage / overflow system. The corridor was lit by at least one lightbulb, hanging from the brick ceiling. I wondered why they bothered to light the corridor as it was really no larger than an average man's arm.