The dream

from an imaginary Lucerne diary.


Last night I had the flying dream again. Or a kind of flying dream. It starts with me entering a double-decker bus, and ascending the stairs to the upper deck. I take my seat and look at the window, but now the bus is hundreds of feet high, and I am staring down through space, down the elongated sides of the yellow bus, onto the rooftops of Lucerne far below. The towering bus starts to move, and I feel like an ant on the top of a moving column, flying through the narrow streets of the old town, dizzy at the height, the speed, the precariousness. The bus hurtles on, leaving Bahnhof Platz, crossing the Seebrucke, turning left on Kapelgasse. People on the streets scurry aside like beetles hit by hot water. On I go, past the Queen Camellia Tea House, the Fritschli restaurant, until we come to a halt in front of the Magic X Erotik Megastore. At that point the roof of the store opens like the petals on a blooming flower, and a giant dildo rises slowly into the air, like a ballistic missile emerging from a silo. It rises and rises until its shiny rounded nose, about thirty feet in circumference, is now parallel to me and my perch in the clouds. Store employees who were taken by surprise and were unable to let go in time are clinging to the top and screaming for me to help them. I am consumed by a feeling of panic, and I run to the stairs to try and descend, but the stairs now seem to spiral downward into infinity, and no matter how fast I go down, the bottom seems eternally out of reach. I look out of the window, and I feel sick to see the first people lose their grip on the dildo and fall, fast and straight, towards the red and brown tiles of the rooftops. I am dizzy now from turning on the endless spiral staircase, and I fight the urge to close my eyes, telling myself that if I fall asleep (even though I know that I am already asleep) I will never be able to escape. So I run and I run, and I try to ignore the crescendo-decrescendo of the voice of each Magic X Erotik Megastore employee swooshing past the window.

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