analyse this

I had a dream once in which I was walking through a neighborhood of houses at dusk. The streets were soft and grassy instead of paved. Some houses were lit inside, some were ablaze with light and overflowing with people and some were simply dark. I came upon a woman pruning a flowering shrub and asked her where I was, and what was this neighborhood?

She told me that in each house was a dream that humans all over the world have, one dream per house, and that for every single dream ever dreamt by a human there is a house in that neighborhood. She explained that no one really knew it but many of us dream the same dream as other people do night after night. If we were to take a survey across the world of the previous night's dreaming, we would find a lot of people had had the same dream as ourselves last night.

She pointed to a house that was overflowing with people. There was a din coming from the house, but it wasn't noise, it was simply energy. She told me that that house kept a particular dream that a lot of people are having right now.

She pointed to a dark house. That house keeps a dream that no one is dreaming right now.

I wandered off down the cool, grassy street under the faint dusky sky and thought about the collective mind.

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Last night I dreamt of the town on the mountainside, the city on the volcano. I looked out the window and told my family that it wasn't clouds in the sky anymore, but ash. The mountain was about to explode.

We had nowhere to go, as we were there on the side of the mountain that was about to give way. I put a handkerchief over my baby brother's face to protect his lungs as the swirling skies lowered to meet the ground. It got very dark. We forged ahead and then I heard the crack from above. I looked up to see where the debris would fall, to see if we would escape it. House-sized rocks flew into the sky, fortunately away from us. I pulled my family down against an escarpment and threw myself over them to shield them from the raining pumice.

The mountain belched forth rock again and again as we made our way in a river of people away from the volcano. I scouted ahead, trying to find the best exit through the maze of urban, almost medieval tunnels and narrow pedestrian paths. I looked back to see the mountain crack into two, and half of it broke into pieces and slid away from us down the slope. And as I turned to continue I saw the ground turning to dust in front of me, breaking into slabs and giving way.

We got out somehow. The last thing I remember was daylight, the dust had settled. We looked back at the once familiar line of peaks to see that one had gone down to the nib, like a jagged, broken tooth, and we wondered what to do next.