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Chapter 11

 Gem Stones

Tonight I found myself in a house, a two-storey resident, where the stair connecting the two floors to each other had some kind of central significance. Apparently I lived in that house, but it felt unfamiliar, unknown, like I didn't belong there – like was it my home, and yet not my home at all. The house wasn't nice, it had no colours and the furniture and things in it were like buried under some kind of a dirty layer, as if no one had cleaned up in the house for ages, and no one seemed to care or take any notice of its condition either. In the dream I was a kid, somewhere around seven years old I should think.
          An old woman used to sit on one of the upper steps of the stair between the two storeys every now and again. I was scared of her because sometimes when she sat there she was alive, and sometimes she was dead. One day a brother, not my brother but a brother to someone who lived in the house with me, decided he should get rid of that woman since I was so afraid of her. I didn't understand what "get rid of" meant, but he went out and after a while he returned to the house, carrying a carpet on his shoulder. In the carpet the woman was rolled up. He had killed her and rolled her corpse up in this carpet, a reddish Oriental carpet.
          I didn't like that. Even if I was really scared of the woman I didn't want her dead. But neither the brother nor anyone else asked me what I wanted, as an adult the brother had just taken care of the situation in a manner he thought deedful and appropriate. He walked past me, still carrying the carpet with the dead woman inside on his shoulder. He climbed the stairs to the upper floor and went in to one of the bedrooms up there where he rolled her body out and into a king size bed. There he left her.
          I went into the bedroom and looked at her. I noticed that she was more dead now than she had been before, when she had sat on the stair being dead, but still she wasn't all dead. As I stood there looking at her, not sure what to do, not feeling anything in particular, just observing that she wasn't dead really, I suddenly saw a baby lying next to her. I didn't know how that happened – where she came from – but for some reason her sudden presence there came as no surprise to me. I just noticed that now this old woman and this newly born child lay next to each other on that bed. I went out, but I kept coming back, over and over, to check on them.
         Sometimes when I got there they were alive, sometimes they were dead. When they were alive, the child was more so than the woman. I knew this from the colours they had. Or, the old woman never changed colour, I just sensed when she was alive and when she was dead. But the child shifted colour dramatically. When alive it had the colour of an ordinary baby, and when dead it was all covered in blue, a deep dark shade of blue, a truly beautiful nuance, but I didn't like it on the child. I used to poke on the child when it was alive, just to be really, really sure it was living, and when I did it began crying in this way newly-born are crying to show discomfort. When that happened I believe the expression on my face was fascination.
          I didn't know what to do with all of this, I just went back to the room, again and again, to watch them, hoping somewhere deep down inside of me that they would continue living.
          The next thing I remember is looking down on several enchantingly beautiful stone formations. The stones were all in the size that barely fits in one of your palms. Each and every one of them where shaped differently, like in accordance with its own specific manner, but they all had one thing in common: their transparency and the little bubbles with air inside. I picked one up and held it in my hand. It felt extraordinary delightful, the stone was so smooth and soft, no sharp edges anywhere, and it was like it had only just stiffened but still wasn't completely settled. I got the impression that if you squeezed it a tad too hard you could change its shape, or at least destroy the brilliance of its surface. I didn't want to do that, I didn't want to change anything about any of them. I just wanted to look at them and hold them, squeeze them ever so gently in my hand, because in doing so I felt how everything about me got filled with their soft, soothing, captivating beauty and love. For wonderful but all too short moments I could receive them fully, and when I did the dirty greyish colourlessness of the world around me seized to exist. Enthralled, all I saw was the beauty of the world as it came across to me – within me – when reflected in their colours.
          I wondered about their origin, where they'd come from, and the moment the question touched upon my mind I knew I already had the answer, I knew it as sure as had someone told it to me long ago, as had I always known and only forgotten for a while, because as soon as I posed the question it all came back to me. I recalled the two bodies/persons on the bed, the old woman and the newly-born child. I remembered they had both been lubricated with formaldehyde and then rinsed with water. The stones that lay before me consisted of residuals from the process of transition that began the second the three elements – bodies, water and formaldehyde – met in entwinement and interlocked. Yes, the three elements had melt together, and subsequently, ever so slowly, the liquids changed into cautiously moulded firm formations, gentle crystallizations in various and breathtakingly magnificent shapes, like the one I now held in my hand.
          Such entwined over the course of immeasurable time the three elements had metamorphosed as one together. And so they'd transformed the unstable condition that had defined each one of them individually when held apart, into a state of firm fulfilment or completeness as they'd aligned themselves with one another, compounded into a solid, dazzling unity. They'd become vibrant precious stones with power to let all colours imaginable lustre through their own translucent bodies; vessels, or channels, that let you gaze into the enigma of Universe Itself. Carrying traces of their former hosts, like radiant reminiscences from midst's of days and dead of nights who had already been there; bygone times of love, fear, comfort, despair, and wrath were yet again aglow and echoing, lingering in discern, silently whispering from within these relics.  And still they were so astoundingly dissimilar, so completely not the same – so pristine in their new nature – they lacked any physical resemblance with what they had once been. Now, they gleamed and shimmered in celestial boon and beauty; glittering eternally in Love.
          The stones in front of me were still slightly mouldable but I knew that as time went by they would become more resilient. Yet they would always remain brittle, they would always hold a core of fragility, because that was their innermost nature. And it was because of this, because of their fragility and the transparency of their own bodies these stones held the blissful might of rendering every nuance and note in all of creation in brilliant clarity and captivating beauty. In these stones the whole of the infinite wonder-spectrum that is the kaleidoscope of creation reflected back on you with such an awe-striking purity only truth and love can candle.
          In that sense, these stones were true miracles, and yet, yet they were only mirrors.  When looking into them you looked into the cycle of life, as it reflected back in your own ever-changing self. This was the reason these stones mesmerized the beholders, touched them with such a wonderful intensity. Because when looking into them you gazed into the soothing light and breath-taking images that comes from looking straight into the essence of your own soul.
          I don't remember what happened next in the dream, it feels like my brain has shut that door to protect me from remembering, but whatever it was, it was something so dreadful, so ruthlessly horrific, I instantly woke up. Maybe, I'm thinking, maybe someone took the stones away from me? 5.55 am.