In the dream, I’m on the moon.
I’m standing still. Scanning my immediate vicinity. Wondering exactly what I’m doing there.
Everything around me is just as you would expect. It’s like I’ve walked right into one of those documentaries about the Apollo missions.
I’m encased in a spacesuit, which makes my surroundings seem slightly remote. As though I’m observing them from a distance.
The sunlight is blinding. But its ghostly radiance only illuminates certain peaks and planes of the lunar surface, whose edges glint with harsh brilliance. And the atmosphere reflects no light at all. So the majority of my surroundings — including the local shadows but meaning mostly the sky, which dominates the flat lunar plains and close horizon — are dark. That’s how it seems to me. The main feature of my environment is a vast hovering darkness.
And it’s quiet here, so quiet. That’s the first thing I notice: The silence. I don’t even hear my own breathing. Occasionally a hinge on my spacesuit may creak or rustle — but that’s it. There’s no other sound.
My booted feet rest on the lunar terrain. And I just stand there, looking up through my helmet’s visor at the stars visible in the black sky. So many celestial bodies are visible from this spot; I imagine I can see all the way to the fourth moon of Uranus. While my head swims in the surrounding silence. A silence as large as an entire world.
The moon’s surface is unnervingly soft beneath my boots. Its top layer isn’t rock, or dirt, or sand. It’s dust — extremely fine, almost powdery dust. Which requires almost no effort to dislodge; the merest breath of wind could do it, if there were any atmosphere at all. This dust must have lain untouched for millions of years. Possibly billions.
The dream usually lasts for some time. Long enough for me to take a few steps across the lunar surface, kicking new trails in the soft Oceanus Procellarum soil. Held only by the moon’s weak gravity, my body feels buoyant. My movements are slow and ponderous, overtly dreamlike. Yet to me, my clumsiness signifies not the actual fact that I’m dreaming — but rather the oneiric difficulty of navigating in low-g while wearing a bulky spacesuit. Meanwhile my boots displace eons of accumulated grit. The disturbed trails simply shift on the ground, without drama or protest. No obstacles complicate my advance, and no puffs of dust rise. As I walk, my head swivels inside my helmet, searching for important features or clues — but all I see are the surface’s blazing radiance and the looming darkness closing down around me.
Sometimes the dream goes on so long that I begin to question basic facts. Like how I got here. Or whether any other humans survive within my ambit. I seem to be entirely alone.
But the silence and solitude are somehow comforting. Serene, beautiful. They will last forever. I can’t possibly tarnish them — I’m much too small and fragile. And I have no desire to leave a mark here anyway. I just want to…explore, I guess. Confirm that there’s no relief from the vast emptiness that surrounds me.
And in the course of these slow-motion dreams, nothing ever does lurch out of the lunar shadows at me. The moon’s surface, except for my halting steps, remains as infallibly still as a tomb.
When I finally awaken, and stir in my familiar bedclothes — everything around me suddenly seems meager and squalid. My bedroom feels overly warm, and appears cluttered with a messy jumble of indistinct colors. The extreme clarity of the dream has completely vanished. As have the immense quiet and emptiness. I can’t even remember their associated sensations. All I feel is the loss of their sublime purity.
Afterwards I wonder why I had this dream again, on that night in particular. And the answer always comes to me: I’ve recently conjured up some thought or observation or maybe even a joke that I wanted to share with you…and then I remembered, for the tenth or the fiftieth or the thousandth time, that you’re gone.
In fact by now so much time has passed, I don’t even quite remember why you left. Maybe you’ve met with an unfortunate accident and shuffled off this mortal coil. Maybe you’re still living in that same apartment across town — but when you stopped answering my e-mails, you really meant it. Or maybe it’s actually your feet which currently rest on another world, following your abduction — adoption? — by an impossibly advanced civilization. Maybe right now you’re seated at a harp with ten-dimensional strings, laboriously composing an interstellar sonata to describe to your curious alien hosts what your life on Earth has consisted of, or simply who you are.
If that’s the case, then I’ll bet your composition is utterly beautiful. Of course I realize that with my limited human ears these passionate strains might just sound like a garbage truck doing its rounds, or an especially clamorous nature documentary. But if this unearthly sonata truly is about you, then I’m sure the resulting music sounds quite lovely to those who have the proper ears — and the extreme good fortune — to hear it.
This is the usual line of thinking that inspires my subconscious to go for a nighttime walk on the moon. After waking from this dream, at my next opportunity, I’ll make a point of stepping outdoors and inspecting the ancient orb, preferably as it rises. I’ll observe it closely with my naked eye and wonder just how far away it is. I know that the astronomical answer, laser-measured for precision, is around a quarter-million miles — the distance light can travel in just over a second. But on these occasions, the moon never seems that far away to me. After all, I’ll think to myself, I was just walking around up there last night.
Image credit: By Nathan Hayag via Fotopedia (CC 3.0 License)
