(part3)

A bright light and I am dreaming, but I know that I am awake. I am not awake but I am moving, climbing up a steep stairway ladder path-bridge in a very large room, still in line with people in a guided tour, dreaming awake.

The tour guide, always just out of view, tells me to keep climbing up a ladder towards a small room at the top of the stairs.

Someone in front of me dreams, wakes up dreaming. I hold the banister of a metal staircase and look to my right as I climb, upwards and see an enormous domed -curved window which makes up the whole side wall I am slowly climbing, feeling very numb. I pause, stopping the line of climbing people and place my arms on the metallic curved railing where the staircase meets the bottom of the window. Cupping my chin on my hands, I look outside that large curved window and I try to understand what I am seeing but I am so numbed that what I see, however dazzling, does not affect me, emotionally.

Outside is blackness. The Earth, floats, white-bluish, to the left and the clear, vivid moon ,to the right in the glass window. The Earth is a blue white haze but for a large red area which I see as the desert of North Africa, or the Arabian peninsula. Far away, violet splashes of nebulae and points of red pinpoint starlight intersperse with millions of white stars.

Chin in hands, I leaned over and said in a sad, wistful, admiring tone, "These people who live at this estate have some view; "wow what a view!"

The tour guide, always just out of view, is startled and quickly the scene is changed to that of a flat one-dimensional English garden landscape.

Chin in hands, still looking out of the window, I say, again, but this time looking and reacting to the garden landscape, They do have a nice view!."

The tour guide, startled to hear me repeat the same phrase and out of touch with the fact that the scene of the garden had already worked to distract me, knee-jerk over reacted.

I was thrown into a vivid emotional ecstasy.

The ladder path transformed into a delicately patterned, dazzlingly ornate inlaid wood design ,cryptic and deep, in both beauty and complexity. In awe, I was forced to kneel and examine it, and turned fully away from the window.

I felt a powerful awe, love, admiration and godlike reverence quickly flash me and then it began to overwhelm me. I felt an awe beyond reverence and worship, now, on my knees, on the wood-inlay staircase, suspended in air, examining the lushly constructed, multi-collared fractals in wood. An awe, tingling through my skin, thrilled me.

The gorgeous staircase intricately embroidered with lush wood patterns elicited in me a powerful, spiritual, heartfelt adoration love for the construction, the unknown artist, the wood pattern, and I became so absorbed, that I forgot, for the moment, what I had seen outside the window.

The sleeping line of climbing people was stopped by my awe and fawning and repeated examination of the simple metal staircase. I repeatedly retraced my steps to further examine it.

The tour guide, always just out of sight, presumed that it was enough. A paternal, parental impatient voice said in my head, "just keep going; it will be there for you to see when you get back." But things change in dreams, I tell myself, and I do not trust that it will be there again for me when I return. I linger, enthralled.

The guide, in classic mind control tactic, had distracted me by making the metal staircase the unrightfully recipient of my awe, rather than that of the scene outside the window, so that I would not understand or remember, but when I woke, I did remember. I recall ,later thinking, that they have uncanny, psychic, mind-bending control over peoples minds; I dully recall that as a thought.

(part4)

I awoke exhausted, with a dull headache and a nose bleed, more tired getting up than I had been, going to bed.

I opened the door, slowly and peeked down the hall; there was no one in evidence. I threw on my striped, tattered bathrobe, full of holes, and barefoot, stole out into the hallway, leaving my door barely ajar. I went to the stairwell, chose the second floor, and peeked up and down the hallway from my vantage point behind a hinge of the stairway door. It was five fifteen a.m. I bolted quickly down the hall and turning quickly in reverse, in three swift movements, picked up, first, from one doormat, a bottle of fresh milk, from a second, a small bag of bakery delivered fresh rolls and finally a scooped up morning paper, under my arm, from a third. My heart pounding, lest I be detected, I ran up, breathless, to the fourth floor, my stolen breakfast in hand and locked the door.

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