I dreamt that I might outrace light
And hurled myself upon the night
To catch the images of kings
Long dead. Propelled by unseen wings,
I shot into the void’s embrace
And brushing by the new moon’s face
Leant out to circumscribe an arc,
And rest there, floating in the dark.
Earth swam sinister into view,
A blazing hoop of white and blue
To dwarf the curved horizon’s shade,
And mock dead rock. Then grown afraid
I pinched myself as courage failed,
And felt my skin grown hard and scaled,
My fingers taloned, black as sin —
And screamed! to hear a voice within:
What little mortal here has dared
To test the sum of Einstein squared —
You seek the face of long dead seers
Yet cannot glimpse beyond your fears?
Just so. He caged us ages past
With bars of Time to bind us fast:
‘At bottom, everything is round,
Even the London Underground!’
His laughter booming in my head
I woke — and wrote these lines in bed.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Whenever I am at all disturbed by such thoughts, however, I remember Jung’s description of Freud as ‘that Austrian quack!’ and the spell is lifted. Any and all interpretations of the above would be welcome. I wrote these lines from notes made immediately upon waking. Which is odd. I haven’t been on the London Underground in twenty years.