The Dream of Dreams

BY GIOVANNI CARMINE COSTABILE

People dream at night since mankind discovered the fire within their minds. Good dreams, bad dreams, weird dreams. Dreams of longing, dreams of love, dreams of revenge, dreams of regret. Dreams of the past, dreams of the present, dreams of the future (though only a few dreams these last). Most dreams reflect everyday life of humans, their petty struggles in petty towns for petty motivations. A more rare variety of dreams may reveal truths about the reality hidden behind the grey curtain of mist enveloping the waking world. But some dreams are given to all men, though only once or twice in a lifetime to most people, that are not merely meaningful, because they hold the key to secret gates locked in dark rooms in the hidden worlds beyond time. Among these key-dreams, there is one in particular that is called the Dream of Dreams, and whoever manages to dream it may unlock the Last Gate between us and the Unfathomable Secret that some say to have been concealed there from the eyes of all Creation by the Old Piper who played the tunes that first set the worlds into motion, lest his daughter the Maiden of Stars, who sang life into existence, use it to compose the Melody of Immortality before the children of men turn to dust. One day, when time was time like any other day since time started, the Maiden of Stars came to one of the children of men and asked him to dream the Dream of Dreams to unlock the Last Gate for her so that they may learn the Unfathomable Secret and make all the children immortal. The child of man said that he would only do it if she married him in return, and the Maiden smiled like the Belt of Orion in agreement. Thus began the Quest that would bring about the ruin of countless worlds beyond the glimpse of human wisdom and understanding.

The man went to the dream interpreters of his tribe, but they confessed that they did not know the secret of the Dream of Dreams. They told the man to ask the Magi of Babylon the Great. So the man set out on his journey and, after mixed fortunes, he came to Babylon to question the Magi. They consulted the stars and told him that the answer could be known to the Egyptian priests of Memphis. The man had to leave and go to Memphis, where he arrived after wandering for a long time in the desert, risking death from thirst and heat. But not even the priests of Memphis knew the answer, not even after having questioned the god Ammon, and they sent him to the haruspices of Etruria. This time the man had to embark and, after having miraculously survived the sirens, the sea dragons and Scylla and Cariddi, finally landed on the coasts of Etruria, where he was able to consult the famous diviners of bird entrails. They examined the remains of a vulture and told him that only the druids of Gaul knew the answer he was looking for. The man crossed the Alps, miraculously surviving the snow storms that raged on the high peaks and the left-handed shots of the giants and goblins of the mountains, and reached Gallic land. There he met the Druids, who burned herbs in a tent, inhaled the smoke and told him to ask Merlin of Britain. Landed in Britain, the man sought the enchanter and, when he found him, questioned him about the Dream of Dreams. “You will have to go to Atlantis,” was the old wizard’s response. The man once again set sail, and his vessel was lifted on the scales of the magnificent Leviathan and hurled to the slopes of the hills of Atlantis the Exalted. Once in the capital of the island, whose name has been forgotten, the man questioned the sages of Atlantis, who revealed to him the existence of a land beyond the West, a continent that did not yet bear a name. There perhaps the shamans knew the Dream of Dreams. But, when the man found the land beyond lands, not even the shamans of those tribes west of west could tell him anything specific, except that continuing west he would arrive east, where he could question the diviners of the Great Khan. The man followed the advice, but the diviners told him that he should question the Brahmins, and they sent him back to Babylon, from where he had started. The man was desperate.

The Old Piper in fact had been afraid that man could find the Dream of Dreams and had played the Melody of Oblivion, erasing any trace that could lead back to the Secret. The man went back to his village, and got lost in the eyes of a damsel drawing water from the spring, and forgot the Star Maiden. The man and the woman had a son, and he had a son by a woman, and the son who came had a son by a woman, and all memory of the Dream Quest was lost. The Old Piper, however, in playing the Melody of Oblivion had been distracted by the birth of a new star lit by the Maiden, and so he had missed a note. Consequently, a trace of the Unfathomable Secret remained in the song of the nightingales. One day, when time was time like every other day since time began, the son of the son of the son of many other fathers before him fell asleep in his flat on the sixteenth floor of the 52nd Street in a city that men called New York, and a nightingale took the opportunity to enter the window and sing him a dream. In the dream, the son of the children of men saw his ancestor questioning the Magi of Babylon, and when he awoke he wondered what this could mean. His amazement grew when every morning he began to wake up with the song of a nightingale in his head and the vivid memory of a new part of the Quest of his Progenitor: one morning he remembered the meeting with the Egyptian priests, the one after the haruspices of Etruria, and so on.

Many dream roads had remained closed, and many worlds had withered and fallen since the progenitor of the son of the children of men had traveled around the world in search of the Dream of Dreams, as the Old Piper had locked up his daughter in the Tower of Heavens in order to punish her for having distracted him while playing the tune of Oblivion, and had even gone so far as to punish men and worlds too, by binding every man of the Seeker’s lineage to the destiny of a world, so that every descendant who died carried a world with him. Who will be able to sing about the fall of Thrasys of the Ezephyrians, or lament the loss of Ofyus the Everglowing? Nobody remembers them anymore, except the tears of the Star Maiden, tears that are shed from the window by the winds of the heavens, that no one knows where they blow, because the Old Piper is capricious and grim, and envies every being who has a face and a voice, because he does not want any other melody to exist than his, which was the first to be performed before the Supreme Thrones.

When the Dreamer had retraced the entire journey of the ancestor in his dreams, the nightingale seized one of the Maiden’s tears in the spout and poured it into the ears of the sleeping descendant, and he dreamed that She begged him to resume the Quest of his progenitor, and in return She would give him the immortal happiness at her side that She had promised to the father of his fathers. The man woke up and was afraid, because in his time the Paths of Dreams as already mentioned had been closed, and dreams were seen as vain visions or symptoms of disease. So the man went to one of the descendants of the ancient healers of souls, and asked him what his dreams meant. The man removed from his face the lenses he was wearing and told him that in his case the only one who could give him a sensible answer was someone who knew what those whom his ancestor had consulted were ignorant of, so he advised him to visit a colleague who lived on the other side of the world, on an island called Australia, where jumping animals lived, and animals that carried their children in a sack. The man immediately took one of the flying chariots that were used to travel long distances at the time and soon he was on the southern island, where in fact he could see jumping animals and animals carrying their children in a sack. The new soul healer he addressed told him that even he did not know the Secret, but he knew it had been handed down, from the time before the Old Piper played the Oblivion Melody, among the shamans of a tribe living in the center of the island, in the middle of the jungle, and who were called the Dream Drums. Reaching them would not be easy without a guide, so the healer entrusted the Dreamer to an old native who knew the way. He was a toothless man with a broad smile and gentle manners, who warned the man: “You can’t just walk to the place you want to reach. The distance you will cover on foot during the day you will have to retrace in a dream during the night ”. The Dreamer nodded that he understood.

On their first day of travel they met a fisherman who hosted them in his lake house. The fisherman told the Dreamer and his guide that he had lost his daughter drowned in the waters near the house. The two travelers did their best to console the fisherman, then they all went to sleep. The Dreamer dreamed that he swam in the lake, that he reached the depths, and that there were cities inhabited by fishmen who had taken the fisherman’s daughter prisoner. The Dreamer then presented himself to the fishmen as the Seeker who would have dreamed the Dream of Dreams, and they asked him to prove what he said. The Dreamer then opened his mouth, and from it came dozens of nightingales, singing underwater as if they were in their native woods. The fishmen thanked the Dreamer and handed him the girl, who he brought back to the surface. When she woke up, the fisherman and his daughter were having breakfast, and neither of them had any memory of her having ever drowned. The guide smiled at the Dreamer, and they resumed their journey.

On the second day of their journey, they found a lost boy in the jungle who had broken his leg. The guide treated him and explained that they would take him to a town where he could find help. When they reached the nearest village, the boy was placed in the care of local healers, who promised to take him back to his parents. That night the Dreamer dreamed that he was himself the child lost in the forest with a broken leg, but the Maiden’s Starsong came to his mind and he sang it. Immediately the forest disappeared and he found himself at his house with his parents. When the Dreamer awoke, there was no trace of the boy in the village, and no one knew what he was talking about when he asked what became of the boy they had brought there the day before. The guide told him that he was never lost and always stayed with his parents.

On the third day the Dreamer and the guide met a couple traveling in the wilderness. They said they wanted to celebrate their union by rediscovering contact with nature and the earth, and for this reason they had painted their skins and wore crowns of leaves and flowers, hunting with spears and picking the fruits and berries they found. When asked if they did not know it was dangerous, the two replied that a fortune teller had told them that only then would they have the child they wanted, since they were both sterile. The guide then uttered a prayer of blessing for them wishing them success in their endeavour, and the Dreamer also prayed to the Man of the Supreme Thrones who had once descended to earth to tell all that not a speck of dust is lost in the eyes of the Winged Chariot of the Heights. In the dream, the Dreamer saw the two lovers sleeping, and kissed them both on the mouth, blowing his breath into them. The next morning, they woke up in a large house where crowds of children were running around, and the couple explained to them that they were their fifteen children and the orphans they were caring for. No one had any idea that they had ever suffered from infertility.

On the fourth day it was the turn of a girl who claimed she was there to wait for them. She claimed to have known she would meet them in one of her dreams, and so she had followed the lead of her instincts to where she felt they would come. They asked her how long she had been waiting for them and she said that the dream of meeting them had been recurring for as long as she could remember, but the time she had arrived in the clearing they were in was just before they arrived. When she was asked why she wanted to meet them, she said she wanted to follow them on their journey, but they were adamant that no companions were needed and that she should return to her former life. She insisted so much, but in the end she had to acknowledge their position and she asked them at least to be able to leave again the next morning, having the opportunity to talk with them at length. So many were the questions that she asked the guide and the Dreamer, and she wanted to know about his ancestors, and about his Quest, and when he had told her everything he remembered she still wanted to know more, but they convinced her that it was better sleep. In his dream, the Seeker took the girl to the Dream Meadows, where she became a young filly to gallop freely until she would take any other form. When they awoke, the girl was gone, and this time it was the Dreamer who smiled at his guide.

On the fifth day, the two travelers reached a river where the smoking ruins of an indigenous village stood, plundered and set on fire by the Hearts of Stone tribe. There were five surviving inhabitants of the village, all that remained of the River Eyes tribe: a blind old man, a lame woman, a mute man, an armless girl and a deaf boy. The Dreamer described to the blind man what he saw, carried the lame woman from the river to the hills and back in his arms, taught the blind man and the deaf boy sign language, and danced with the one-armed girl. The guide meanwhile sang an ancient lament of his people for the villagers dead. During the night, the Dreamer dreamed that he was in the village when it was attacked. The Hearts of Stone numbered in the hundreds, and with them rode the Demons of the Blood Rocks on their Nightmare Kangaroos. The Seeker then blew the Horn of the Ancestors and called back to life all his progenitors up to the First Seeker who had been to Babylon and had returned to Babylon. The Seeker’s ancestors had eyes of jade and hands of alabaster, with which they held spears of ebony. And the spears pierced the hearts of the Kangaroos of Nightmares, of the Demons of the Blood Rocks and of the Hearts of Stone, and they were no more. Then from the spilled blood arose a colossal figure, scarlet and evil, an ancient Dragon of the End, and in a voice of thunder he declared that the Old Piper would not let the Dreamer find the Unfathomable Secret. So saying, he swept away all of the Seeker’s ancestors with his tail, but the Seeker was not intimidated and sang the Song of Rebirth, which he just then remembered having been learned from him or some of his forefathers in some dream of the Maiden of Stars. The Dragon blossomed and was devoured by the ground, and the Dreamer awoke. The village was intact, with no signs of attack or fire, and in one place the ground was covered with flowers that, according to the villagers, never faded. When the Dreamer asked the old man, the other man, the woman and the two children, who were now entirely healthy, what was the story of the flowery meadow, they told exactly the story of his dream, of how millennia ago an ancient hero had saved the village from an attack by the Hearts of Stone tribe, who controlled the Demons of the Blood Rocks and the Kangaroos of Nightmares, and how he had transformed the Dragon of the End into that flowery meadow by singing the Song of Rebirth, which was still handed down today in the tribe. “Your dreams are overflowing into the waking world, Dreamer,” the guide explained. “Soon it will no longer be possible to distinguish the two, and then we will have reached the Heart of the Dream.”

On the sixth day, the Dreamer and his guide reached the rocky plateau where the tribe known as the Dream Drums lived, but they had to cross a rope bridge to access it. Before doing so, the guide wanted them to stop and start a fire. “To enter the Dream Heart you will have to purify yourself of the waking man,” he explained to the Dreamer. “What should I do?” the latter asked. “Listen”. The guide took his drum and began to beat it, intoning an unintelligible song that, as it rose, echoing among the rocks, began to acquire meaning for the Dreamer. Soon, he not only understood the words of the song, but he could see the story told as if it happened in front of him. “When the days had not yet begun, the Winged Chariot ran on the waters of his imagination, having fun raising jets and splashes that came to life at his touch and then returned to the Ocean of Dreams. When the days had not yet begun, nothing could change, so no one knows why suddenly something changed, but in fact one of the jets entered an axis of the Chariot and sent a wheel away. The wheel spun on the water forever, but forever was no longer forever, because the Chariot had lost a wheel, and so the wheel stopped, and on it was the Old Piper, whom no one knows whence did come. Then the Chariot was angry, and thus spoke to the Piper: ‘Since you have stopped the wheel, yours is the Melody of Creation, because so it is with the wheel. But, because you have stopped the wheel, you will never have your daughter, even though she is born from the Ocean’. The Old Piper cursed the Chariot, but he did not know that the Chariot cannot be cursed, and those who curse him are cursing themselves. Hurriedly, before the Star Maiden was born, he hid the Unfathomable Secret behind the Last Gate, and locked it with the Key kept in the Dream of Dreams, which no one will be able to dream until the wheel starts again and the Old Piper returns to the Winged Chariot what was taken from him by the Ocean. But, even if the Old Piper wanted to remedy his wrongs, which he does not, he cannot return to the Ocean of Dreams, and no one knows where the lost wheel from the Chariot is. All that is known is that, after hiding the Secret, the Piper played the Melody of Creation, bringing the worlds into existence as a welcome gift to his daughter, whose beauty had blinded him and whom he suddenly wanted to please, oblivious to the threat that she constituted for him. The Star Maiden was born from the Ocean of Dreams and she was amazed at the greatness and vastness as well as the number of worlds, but she was sad because there was no life on them. Thus she sang the Song of Life and brought into existence plants, animals, men and every other race on all the worlds that could host them. For this reason the Old Piper immediately hated his daughter, because he estimated that she was ungrateful for the gift he had given her, and that she did not find it pleasant unless decorated with those noisy and smelly creatures, which evidently represented a mockery towards him. Then he remembered the words of the Winged Chariot, and he knew that his daughter really did not belong to him, and he was very angry, but hid his anger from her because he knew how best to act. Indeed, the Song of Life had given life to all creatures, and they would never have lost it if the Maiden had not accepted to sing to the sound of the Old Father’s Fife. He deceived her, deluding her that the Melody of Creation and the Song of Life together would give life to something even more beautiful than what already existed, and so indeed it would have been if he had been honest, even if we are not given to know what is Beauty beyond Beauty and Bliss beyond Bliss. But the Old Piper interposed notes of his own devising to the Melody of Creation, which some say to be the same ones he had played to steal the wheel of the Chariot, and so the Melody of Creation came to host within it the disharmony of destruction, and the Maiden who followed the Melody inadvertently came to sing the Song of Death as well. By the time she realized it, it was too late, but the Star Maiden belongs to the Winged Chariot, and so she could fix her eyes on the Old Piper’s eyes, and for the only time in all eternity it happened that the Piper himself was enchanted, and he was compelled to reveal to his daughter that the remedy to death existed if someone found the Key to the Last Gate in the Dream of Dreams, so as to discover the Unfathomable Secret. Now you know everything I could tell you, Dreamer, and you are purified and ready to enter the Heart of the Dream”.

The fire had gone out, and it was now evening, but the Seeker followed the guide on the bridge in order to cross it. A roar rang in the air, followed by another, and the guide slumped to the ground with a hole in his chest, followed by the Dreamer. On the other side of the bridge, in fact, stood the Guardian with his iron of fire, with which he hurled thunder that opened holes in bodies. He had been sent by the Old Piper to bar access to the Dreamheart. The Seeker placed his hand on the hole in his guide’s chest, but the guide said, “Go. I lived for this. I die for this. I can already see my ancestors calling. Go”. The Dreamer, who also had a hole in his shoulder, got to his feet in pain, when another roar rang out, and another hole was opened in his leg. Another thunder, another hole. And another. And another. The Dreamer fell to the ground, and the Guardian laughed, advancing on the bridge towards him. With each step he fired another shot, piercing him like a sieve. The Seeker marveled that he was still alive despite so much pain, and then, as the Guardian aimed for the head, he felt himself being lifted off the ground and saw his body from above, as if he were another person. Then instantly he understood, and said: “Life is a dream”, distracting the Guardian who missed his aim. The latter looked around, pointing his rifle up, frightened. “Who is that? Who spoke?” The Seeker inwardly smiled. The rifle fired, but only feathers came from its barrel. “What?” the Guardian wondered, then he was transformed into a hippopotamus, too heavy for the bridge to support, and fell with it into the precipice. The Dreamer re-entered his body, which immediately regenerated all the wounds, and looked in the direction of the guide, but he was no longer there. The Dreamer smiled and crossed the precipice on foot, treading on air as if it were solid earth.

When the seventh day had not yet dawned, the Dreamer set foot on the plateau of the Dream Drums and thus entered the Dream Heart. He saw his parents again, he saw all those he had been related to in his waking life, but he did not stop with them, because he knew they would hold him back. He stopped instead when he encountered a Dream Drum, the one who must have been the shaman of the tribe. He was also sitting by a fire, smoking a long pipe which he offered him. The Dreamer refused, but sat down in front of the shaman and asked him how to dream the Dream of Dreams. The shaman laughed so much that he coughed, then inhaled again on the pipe and said: “A story for a story. What do you have to offer?” The Dreamer thanked the guide in his heart and told the story which he had heard the day before, of the Winged Chariot and the Old Piper and the Star Maiden. The shaman listened carefully, then put down his pipe and closed his eyes. The silence around was broken only by the voices of the spirits hovering around their fire.

“When the Winged Chariot lost its wheel, the Charioteer fell from the Chariot into the Ocean of Dreams. He is the Man of the Celestial Thrones who looked into the Dream Ocean and saw himself reflected. The Man’s reflection is the Old Piper, and he first played before the Thrones, and pleased the Chariot that sits on the Thrones. But his betrayal imprisoned the Man in the Ocean of Dreams until the day He came to earth, born of his daughter, the Lady of the Waters. The Man taught the children of men that when they become dust the dust will become eternity, but the men did not understand his words and killed him. This is the key to the Dream of Dreams. Are you ready to take it?” The Dreamer was shivering. Suddenly the air was chilly. But still he did not understand. “Did I come all this way for another puzzle?” he said, and stood up, abandoning the shaman. “I will find who really knows the answer!” he exclaimed.

As he walked away, the crippled remnants of the village he had defended against the Stone Hearts met him. The little girl offered him her arm which he had given back to her, the boy held his ears in his hand, while the man held out his tongue, the woman her leg, the old man his eyes. The Dreamer screamed and ran on. Under a tree he found, awaiting him, the girl he had freed, and he fell madly in love with her, and lay with her under the tree, and awoke in the barren couple’s big house to find that they were themselves the couple, and were no longer sterile, and they had fifteen children and cared for the orphans. The Dreamer was delighted, and even more so when a strange man and a native guide brought back their youngest child, who had apparently been lost in the jungle and had broken his leg, but had been found and nursed back to health. As an old man, the Dreamer complained that, of all his children still alive, one daughter in particular, who was perhaps his favorite, had drowned in the lake near his home, but the daughter suddenly woke up just when the healers had already taken her for dead, and the old Dreamer was glad that he could spend his last days in the same happiness as the rest of his life.

One night the old Dreamer awoke and, without knowing why, went to the clearing where once he and his guide had met the girl he was to marry, and there he was enveloped in a great light. Before his astonished eyes, the Star Maiden appeared to him. “Thank you,” she said. Suddenly the Dreamer remembered his ancient Quest, and fell to his knees before her apparition. “Forgive me, my lady. I have betrayed you, like the father of my fathers”. She smiled: “No, Dreamer. None of you betrayed me. You said it yourself. Life is a dream. And also death is a dream. This is the key to the Dream of Dreams, which you have found, and which your ancestor had already found. Who do you think was the girl he saw at the well, and with whom he fell in love? Who do you think was the girl you thought you freed, and who freed you instead? The Melody of Immortality has always been the one that all the worlds play and sing incessantly, since before they came into existence, and it is older than the Old Piper himself. The Last Gate only concealed the deception that something was hidden, the Old Piper’s subtlest deception, but for that very reason the most vain of his tricks. The Old Piper was always the one who deceived himself, if he ever believed that the Chariot would let him get in his way when the Chariot himself did not want to. But the veil shall remain over the eyes of the children of men until the wheel turns again, for so it is with the wheel. In the end the Man of the Thrones, the Charioteer of the Winged Chariot, will come again, and then the worlds will return to the Ocean of Dreams, but none of the living will be lost, for they will continue to dream”. The Dreamer nodded. Now he understood. “You came to get me.” She nodded. “Do you know the way?” she asked him. “You will have to guide me,” said the Dreamer. Then the Dreamer closed his eyes and held out his hand, and the Maiden took the Dreamer by the hand and led him to dwell with her among the stars, and their dreams were one dream in the myriad dreams that make up the Ocean of Dreams.