------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------
If he doesn't dream of you anymore...
"The World in the Mirror"①，VI
① "The World in the Mirror", another fairy tale novel written by British writer Carol (1832-1898) after "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Carol makes various fantasies based on children's psychology, especially the description of the dream world. It seems absurd, but it has far-reaching implications. He is slightly ridiculed and humorous to the world.
In the night when he couldn't see his fingers, no one saw him go ashore, no one saw the small bamboo stick sinking into the sacred swamp. But a few days later, everyone knew that this taciturn man came from the south. His hometown was one of the countless villages on the upper reaches of the river. It was located in the wild on the other side of the mountain, where the ancient Persian language had not yet been influenced by the Greek language, leprosy. Diseases are also not common. To be sure, this gray man kissed the silt and climbed up the steep bank, ignoring the sharp-edged thatch that scratched him all over his body. He was dizzy and bloodied and crawled to the center. Ring place of Shihu or Shima. This place, which used to be ochre red and now gray, is the remains of a burned temple, bullied by the miasma, and the gods inside are no longer enshrined by people. The foreigner lay under the podium. The sun rising above his head woke him up. He was not surprised to find that the wound had stopped bleeding; he closed his pale eyelids and went to sleep, not because of exhaustion, but because of his will. He knew that the temple was the place where his invincible will yearned; he knew that there were also places in the lower reaches of the river. A suitable temple was abandoned after being burned, but the expanding trees failed to bury it; he knew that the next task was to sleep and dream. At midnight, he was awakened by the scream of birds. The scattered barefoot prints on the ground, some figs, and a water jar show that the locals have seen it secretly, but they dare not alarm him. They prayed for his shelter or were afraid of his magic. He shuddered, and found a tomb hiding in the middle of the ruined wall, covered with some unknown leaves.
Although the purpose of guiding him here is extraordinary, it is not impossible to achieve. He wants to dream of a person: he wants to dream about that person unhappily and make it a reality. This magical thought occupied his entire mind; if anyone asked him what his name was and what his previous experiences were, he might be at a loss. The ruined temple meets his requirements, because it is the smallest part of the tangible world; it is also a condition to have chaimen nearby, because those people are responsible for satisfying his frugal living needs. The rice and fruits they enshrine are enough to sustain his body that specializes in sleeping and dreaming.
Those dreams were chaotic at first; after a while, they became a bit dialectical. A foreigner dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater. The theater was similar to a burnt-down temple: the stairs were filled with silent students; the faces of the students were centuries away from now, and they were hanging high. In the cloud, but still clearly identifiable. He taught them anatomy, cosmic structure, magic. Each face was intent on listening to the class and trying to give a decent answer. It seemed that they all knew the importance of the exam. Passing the exam would free them from the illusory situation, the real world of the umbilical body. That person was thinking about the answers to those phantoms, whether in a dream or when he was awake, not letting go of a student who tried to get through. At the same time, from some confusion, we found out what can be made. He is looking for souls worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine nights or ten nights, he was a little sad to find that students who passively accepted his doctrines could not have high hopes; those students who occasionally offered a bold and reasonable contrary opinion were ruinous. Although the former is cute and worthy of attention, they cannot be a person with personality; the latter is slightly better than them. One afternoon (now it is also used for dreaming in the afternoon, except for waking up for an hour or two in the morning, he sleeps all day), he let the fantasy huge college permanently suspend classes, leaving only one student. The child was silent, melancholy, sometimes disobedient, and had a thin face similar to that of his teacher. The sudden dissolution of the classmates did not make him confused for a long time; after several separate lessons, his progress surprised the teacher. However, disaster came. One day, the man seemed to wake up from the slimy desert, and found that the hazy twilight was suddenly no different from the dawn, and he knew that he was no longer dreaming. That night and the next day, his unbearable sobriety made him desperate. He thought of exploring the jungle, making himself exhausted; but among the poisonous celery, he only had a few short and vague dreams, and got some fleeting and fragmented impressions, which were useless. He wanted to re-convene the students, and just said a few words of exhortation, the college changed its shape and disappeared. In that almost endless awake, he was crying with anger.
He understands that even if he sees through all the mysteries of high and low levels, it is still the most difficult task one can do to shape the chaotic dream material: it is more difficult than weaving ropes with sand or making money with invisible wind. many. He understands that initial failure is inevitable. He vowed to forget the huge illusion that misled him in the first place, and to find another way of working. Before implementing that method, it took him a month to recover the energy wasted due to delirium. He doesn't think about dreaming at all in advance, and he can almost have a reasonable sleep time every day. During this period, he rarely dreamed, even if he did, he did not pay attention to the scene in the dream. He will wait until the moon is at its fullest before returning to work. At the same time, he bathed in the river in the afternoon, worshipped the constellations, pronounced a powerful name with standard pronunciation, and then fell asleep. He almost immediately dreamed of a beating heart.
He dreamed of an active, warm, and secret heart in a gloomy human body without a face and gender, about the size of a fist, and garnet red; on the fourteenth moonlight night, he dreamed of it infinitely and affectionately. Every night, he inspected it with greater certainty. He does not touch: it is limited to confirming, observing, and perhaps correcting it with his eyes. He perceives and experiences from various distances and angles. On the fourteenth night, he gently touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, and then touched the entire heart from the outside to the inside. The result of the examination satisfied him. One night, he deliberately did not dream: Then he picked up the heart, called the name of a planet, and began to figure out the shape of another major organ. Within a year, he reached the bones and eyelids. Countless hairs are perhaps the most difficult job. In his dream, he imitated a complete person, a teenager, but the teenager could not stand up, could not speak, and could not open his eyes. Night after night, he dreamed that the boy was sleeping.
According to the Gnostic doctrine of the origin of the universe, the creator created a red, unable to stand up Adam; the magician spent so many nights to create the dream Adam, as clumsy, rough and primitive as the earthly Adam . One afternoon, the man almost ruined the entire project in a rage, but then he regretted it again. (In fact, it is better to ruin.) He begged the gods on the ground and in the river, and crawled under the foot of the statue of a tiger or a horse, begging for helplessness. That evening, he dreamed of the statue, dreaming that it was alive and trembling: it was not an indescribable hybrid of a tiger and a horse, but had the properties of those two animals, and at the same time it was a bull, a rose, A storm. The multiplicity god only told him that its earthly name was "fire", and that it had received worship and worship in the ring-shaped temple (and other similar temples), and it made the phantom he dreamed of miraculous The earth was so alive that all creatures, except for the "fire" itself and the dreamer, thought it was a flesh and blood person. It ordered him to send him to the temple with the ruins of the pyramids in the lower reaches of the river, once he had taught the various rituals of the race, to be worshipped. In the dream of the dreamer, the dreamer wakes up.
The magician executed the order. It took him a while (the result was two years) to disclose the mystery of the universe and the fire worship ceremony to the boy. From the bottom of his heart, he didn't want to break up with the boy. He excuses the need for teaching to extend the time he spends on dreaming every day. At the same time he reshaped the boy who might be defective. Sometimes he felt uncomfortably that all that had happened...In general, his life was very happy; he closed his eyes and thought: Now I want to be with my son. Occasionally I also think; the son I created is waiting for me, if I don't go, he won't survive.
He gradually familiarized the boy with reality. Once, he ordered the boy to put a flag on the top of a distant mountain. The next day, the flag really flew up on the top of the mountain. He did other similar experiments, one more time bolder. He felt a little sad that his son was about to be born—maybe he couldn't wait. That night, he kissed the boy for the first time and sent him through the thorny forest and swamp to another deserted temple in the lower reaches of the river. Before that, (in order to never let him know that he was a phantom, but to make him think that he was exactly the same as others), he made the teenager forget all these years of study.
His victory and tranquility are full of boredom. Every day in the twilight, he kneels in front of the stone statue, and perhaps in his imagination he saw his unrealistic son performing the same ritual in other circular ruins in the lower reaches of the river; he stopped dreaming at night, even if he dreamed, he looked like an ordinary person. Like that. He vaguely felt the sound and shape of the universe: the son who was not in front of him drew nourishment from his declining soul. The purpose of his life has been achieved; he has been in a certain ecstasy. After a period of time (some storytellers count this period in years, and others in five years), the two rowers woke him up in the middle of the night: he couldn't see what they were. Face, but I heard them say that there was a magical man in a temple in the north, who would not be burned by the fire if he stepped on it. The magician suddenly remembered what God had said, and he remembered that the only thing in the world is fire knowing that his son is a phantom. This incident comforted him at first, but later annoyed him. He worried that his son thought of that unusual feature and found himself just a phantom. Not a person, but a projection of another person's dream, how frustrating and confusing it should be! People who are fathers care about the children they give birth to at a time of confusion or happiness; the magician spent a thousand and one secret nights and sporadicly figured out the future of the son, of course he worried about him.
The ending he thought came very suddenly, but it was not without warning. First (after a long period of drought), a cloud floats like a bird to the top of a hill in the distance; then, the southern sky becomes pink like a leopard's gum; then, the smoke rusts the metal at night; finally, the beasts Fleeing in horror. What happened hundreds of years ago is happening again. The ruins of the Huoshen Temple were burned again. At dawn when the birds were extinct, the magician saw the fire rolling towards the center of the ruined wall. In an instant, he wanted to jump into the water to escape, and then thought that death came to end his old age and free him from hard work. He walked towards the flame. The flame did not swallow his flesh, but comforted him without scorching and drowning him. He knew with relief, ashamed, and fear that he himself was also a phantom, the phantom of another person's dream.
The above is translated from "The Fictional Collection"
View more about The Thirteenth Floor reviews
