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Sketches of Dread a dream by Paul Garner's subconscious My pet eel is in a funny mood. I watch helplessly as he opens his mouth wide and swallows my soul, whole .../ The world slowly tilts 90 degrees until everything is hellishly sideways .../ I'm walking down by the motorway. A truck pulls up, or maybe I'm in England, in which case an 'articulated lorry' pulls up, underneath a bridge or overpass, beside a factory. The lorry proceeds to stop traffic in all lanes in both directions as it backs up to the factory gate to unload the contents of its container, and I have to stop walking and stay out of the way as the driver manouevers. I watch in helpless fascination as I can see the trailer is about to become grounded on the median strip, yet the lorry keeps backing up. Slowly, inexorably, the trailer gets stuck yet, oblivious, the driver keeps backing up even as the driving wheels of the lorry are trying to push themselves up off the ground, and it can move no further. Traffic, mostly other lorries, is starting to build up in either direction and to my surprise I notice a couple of them pulling out and starting to position themselves to back up to the factory. Their diesel engines rev as the roar of traffic from the overpass above continues unabated. I'm forced to step back a few metres to give them room to move, and as I watch I start to feel a sickness in the pit of my stomach as a second lorry grounds itself in the same way as the first. Now a third lorry is making exactly the same mistake and I start to shout out a warning, but no one can hear me over the sound of the engines. The third lorry is in a worse position than the other two in fact; as it inevitably gets stuck somehow it jack-knifes awkwardly and ends up tilted on its side. I run up to warn the driver, then realise it maybe isn't safe, just as a fourth truck begins to grind against the curb and wedge itself inextricably between the first two. I look around feeling a sense of mounting dread as another truck starts reversing somewhere, certain that before long one of the precariously balanced loads will come crashing down. I'm soon in the middle of a tangled clot of creaking, straining lorries which seem almost to be clambering over each other in their mindless attempts to back up to the factory. The way back out into the open has been blocked, so in desperation I run towards the factory fence; there's no gate so I climb over it, thankful that there's no razor wire along the top. I look around to get my bearings; there are sheets and cubes of scrap metal everywhere. Suddenly a pile of them start to move and I jump out of the way, just in time, as they are crushed by some powerful compacting machinery and spat out. The whole factory lot now becomes a moving obstacle-course of scrap and dangerous machinery, under a blue grey sky, as the plug of twisted lorries continues to coalesce. I dodge around the steaming tarmac and rubble, hopping across piles of scrap, occasionally standing on a piece that starts to move underneath me. There doesn't seem to be any way out of this maze, as the factory chimneys smoke away behind me in the distance. "Fuck this," I think and wake myself up. .../ Walking down a street in Okinawa, beside a traffic jam, in a run-down-and-funky part of town. Two men in black puff-ball anoraks run up and start beating on a third guy, but the noise of the traffic makes it a little like watching a silent movie. I want to go over and help, find out what it's all about, but I'm scared. A swarthy Okinawan taxi driver in a red sweatshirt idles forward in front of me, his elbow hanging out of the open window. He doesn't speak any English but he has a wide and cynical grin which speaks volumes. He laughs and gestures to my knees as if to say, "You won't last long in this place." .../ Wandering around London I realised I had stumbled into a huge U.S. army base on legs. It was the size of a city itself, and mobile, perambulating slowly across the landscape as required. It provided berth for many large warships, aircraft carriers and the like. Gigantic, hydraulic, robotic. It had a mind of its own and there I was walking along a road to suddenly find everything moving around me - huge pistons moving the roadway which revealed itself to be part of a leg... I ran to avoid being crushed amongst the huge machinery rearranging the roadway I was following... Back Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner. |
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