#13

A Dream I Had About Pineapple Juice


You can tell things are getting under your skin when you dream about them ...
I meant to write about this yesterday, when the dream was still fresh. But it was a busy day and there were things to do, and if I’m honest (which I try to be), my dreams fade fast and only come back in flashes. Unbidden. Like vivid flash-memories of places I’ve been, complete with smells and a soundtrack.

Anyway. 

I had a dream about this project. And of course when I say ‘I had a dream’, I mean I remembered a snatch of a much longer dream, probably about all sorts of stuff. You know how dreams are. I don’t remember much more than that snatch, and, you know, in the way of dreams, I can’t be sure if I’m embellishing somewhat — adding sense and dramaturgy — but I will try not to embellish further here.

So, in the dream, there was a large relief map of some mountain range and the valleys and other ranges around it. It was in a studio, perhaps like the studios over at that building I shall not name that forms part of the fortifications of the old Berlin wall. You know the one. A white box, but not pristine. Cold. Perhaps my feet were hanging out of the bed, or perhaps I had wriggled out of my socks and I was cold. But anyway. White box. Relief map, filling up the whole floor.

It was made of plastic, I think. Kind of like the plastic that they make the moulded hills for miniature trainsets. It was BIG. Big enough that the tops of the mountains came up to my waist when I stood in the valleys. 

(I doubt the valleys are that steep, the real ones, but they might be)

And it was painted in various shades of green and brown with altitude lines like a map. Now I come to mention it here, the altitude lines were not really necessary as it was three-dimensional but there you go, eh. Dreams.

It was not a performance. It was a dress rehearsal.

I had a new idea. I clambered among the mountains and it was my idea that I would fill up the valleys with pineapple juice up to a certain height. Up to one of the altitude lines. It was something to do with climate change. Or was it a metaphor of drowning. It gets hazy there.

I know where the pineapple juice comes from, though, at least. The same day when we went shopping we forgot to buy juice. So once we got home, I popped out to the Späti. The nice one, the clean one, where all the products are dusted and lined up in rows. They sell the nice juice in the glass bottles. The one with just the name of the fruit in German on a coloured label. You know the one. 

As I picked up the second bottle (cloudy apple), I saw the pineapple juice. And I almost put down one of the apple juices and swapped it but then I didn’t. I had come for apple juice. Pineapple juice would be ... what? Frivolous?

Anyway, I left with no pineapple juice. And now my soul is yearning.