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Mastaba
Porte D'entrée
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Peter Cherches
{below}
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Peter Cherches
Whose Dream?
I’m huddled in a crowd. I smell sweat all around me, I smell fear, the acrid scent of adrenaline. I’m dreaming in black and white; that’s odd, I always dream in color. The time is not now, it’s another time, early 1940s, I’d say. I’m wearing a ragged old overcoat, my face all stubble. The men, the adult men, many are stone-faced, staring into a void, others heads hung, some quietly weeping, some muttering prayers. Women are sobbing, wailing, holding children close to their breasts. A couple of little boys are roughhousing off to the side, seemingly unaware of what’s going on.
We’re standing by a railway siding. I see boxcars, open, empty, nothing inside, just space. I realize we’re in Nazi Germany, or perhaps occupied Poland, and I’m waiting for transport to a death camp.
The kommandant—I assume that’s what you call the uniformed personage barking orders—looks disturbingly familiar. I realize why: It’s my next-door neighbor. “Schnell! Schnell!” the neighbor keeps yelling.
That prick, I think, he’s everywhere.
Then he does something odd: He puts his hand to his face and starts tugging at his skin. The skin on his face starts bunching up as he pulls. It comes off. It was a mask. It’s not the neighbor’s face underneath, it’s mine, clean shaven.
He goose steps his way over to me. “Achtung!” he barks. I stand at attention. He puts his hand to my face, does the same thing, pulls a mask off, and shows me my real face in a mirror.
I’m not me, I’m him.
But I (the dreamer, that is) am still identifying with the trembling, quaking shadow of a man destined for the cattle car, despite the change of face. The one with my face, the robust, well-fed Nazi, is a pretender, a phony, a fraud.
Is the neighbor sending me to my death, or is it the other way around?
I’ve always heard that you can’t die in your own dream, but whose dream is this?
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Danse Macabre
An Online Literary Magazine
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