dreams, doctor?

It is early morning, still gloomy (in a Scottish autumnal way) before dawn. We might be looking at Queensferry Road in Edinburgh, just south of the suburb of Barnton (where I used to deliver milk every morning just before my accident). I’m with a friend, male, possibly from school days but I can’t see who it is or make out his face (or maybe it’s simply that I can’t recall who it was). We are floating in the air above the pavement at about the same height as the upper windows of the double decked buses that pass along the street. The buses are full of commuters making their way to work. My friend swims over to buses that pull up at the bus stop. He taps the windows upstairs trying to attract the attention of passengers but no one takes any notice. They are completely oblivious to us swimming in the air outside.

We swim away from the bus stop, heading west along Queensferry Road. Armies of commuters tramp along the pavement below us, heading in the opposite direction. We can swim effortlessly through the air. There is no resistance so one stroke (we’re doing the breast stroke) takes us very far. We lift up and down to various heights off the ground. A favourite trick is to swim just above the heads of pedestrians below us then ruffle their hair as if the wind was deliberately playing with their carefully combed appearances.

We reach the end of Queensferry Road at the Barnton roundabout but we’re no longer in Edinburgh. The roundabout has gone. The road curves uphill to the left. We’re blown off the road by a strong wind. We land in a rich green field with a series of undulating bumps and dips. Through the top of the bumps in the middle of the field there is a huge gouged path as if something has torn through the land with great speed and force. Whatever it was came from the sky because the gouges are shallower to the west, becoming progressively deeper the further east one looks. At the end of the gouged path there is a broken object dug deeply into the ground. I could be a meteor but it looks more like a giant baked potato that has burst open during baking.

We land to sit beside the extra-terrestrial baked potato. Sitting at its core there is a small, grey object about the same size and shape as a Cadbury’s cream egg. It has the texture of very fine sand paper but it is hard, dense. I struggle with a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, to pull the egg shaped stone out of the baked potato. We both want it and fight over it. I win. The small object is almost impossibly heavy to hold. It seems to have characters on it written in a script I do not recognise and cannot read. The script is geometric in shape, minimalist in style. I wonder what it means then walk away carrying the object in my pocket.