I had a dream last night that I got in an elevator and pressed down, but the elevator wouldn't go down. It went up instead, to the top floor of a building where no one was. I stepped out of the elevator and suddenly I sensed that everything was ending. It was that moment in a dream when you start to realise that a dream is just a dream, but the end of the dream came before the realisation: I didn't realise I was dreaming until I sat up, fully awake. In the dream, my vision suddenly looked like a failing computer monitor and I thought, I'm dying.
I woke and had these words immediately in my mind, from the linear notes of a
Larry Norman album I memorised when I was religious. In it Norman recounts his own waking from a particular dream:
The garden the planet
the land of the sun
past present future
the history's done
each life has three parts
'til the three become one
eternity stretches
for eons to come
And then I woke up.
And it ends like that too, 'And then I woke up.'
