That being said, I have last night experienced a dream of quite amazing coherence, lending itself quite well to such a translation. Not only because the dream followed a 28-hour work-dinner-drink-fun session meaning it impressed itself on my weary mind, but also because it was uncannily like your typical catastrophe film.
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Imagine a society like ours, people dining in what is the newest cool restaurant, this time themed like a socialist East Block state-run restaurant. Thick white tablecloths cover standard issue tables, surrounded with chairs upholstered in the most unflattering course brown fabric. I am meeting a friend there and he arrives before I have time to look at the menu. We exchange pleasantries - it is obviously not a terribly enjoyable dinner date, but rather one that was long overdue and fraught with awkward silences. We chose steak as the main, but the conversation soon veers towards my sudden (and surprising) wondering about whether I should become a vegetarian. It is, after all, strange to eat meat in a time when the animals have turned against us. This is where the familiar reality of the setting begins to take on a fantastical quality. Yes, the animals have turned on humans. We talk about whether he misses his dog, which was put down right at the beginning of the animal revolt and wonder about the difficulties of obtaining prime cuts of meat, since all cattle for human consumption must be kept sedated.
Suddenly, I remember how not even a year has passed since humans were forced to life in big walled cities, devoid of animal life, surrounded by moats, barbed fences and stubbornly clutching at the frail normality of everyday life. I remember seeing news reports of the first animal attacks, initially thought to have been a virus affecting mammals and only later quietly confirmed as a problem of much larger and significant proportions; the animals, that mass of ugly, unrestrained life has obtained a common mind, and that mind has but one goal, to destroy all that is human, all that is sapient.
I return home to more bad news. Some city whose name was not mentioned has just been overrun by a horde of animals, from elephants, monkeys, cats, dogs and horses, its walls breached, its population slaughtered in an orgy of trampling, biting, foaming mouths and focused black eyes. My mother, the head of the family which now all lives in one large apartment block (coincidentally the one I grew up in) organizes the preparations which we now all know are necessary. Windows on the ground floor are taped, all crevices sealed and then boarded up, the cellar is inspected for holes and burrows, the TV blaring in the background constantly rerunning the aerial footage of the animal flood breaching the city's defences. It is all over, we all know it. My mother, my aunts, me and my friends, we all know that there is no escape, that our time has come and that the end will be brutal, robbed of illusions of a noble death.
I turn again to the television and switch to a documentary about human life outside the cities. The filmmaker has travelled to Africa in search of surviving humans, a mission of considerable risk. Finally, his efforts are rewarded as he stumbles upon a small community of people, all naked and half starved, who have been surviving by pretending to be animals. They speak, unsure of the faculty of language which they abandoned to survive, and explain that this is the only way to live, but that the monkeys especially tend to recognize them as human. It is hopeless, then.
I decide to go out. Staying at home will not change anything and the windows have all been finished anyway. Where else to go but the modern theatre cafe? When I arrive, I find a great commotion of fashionable people, all meandering between tables stacked high with thick volumes of a paperback book. It is the long-awaited reprint of a History of 20th Century Cinema, complete with a practical criticism and filmmaking appendix and helpfully colour coded; Nouvelle Vague, Fellini are but two of the headings which I spot. And then I remember, what is the point in this mass self-deception? The crowd falls silent as a television screen blares out the reporters unrestrained horror. New York has just been overrun, the wilderness is running down the broad avenues, buildings are on fire. It has come and I suddenly feel I'm not breathing, the long awaited realisation of total, collective death has come.
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Needless to say, I've spent the gray day revisiting the images and the crushing anxiety of the dream. And yes, perhaps I am afraid of the loss of intellect, the loss of judgement, the victory of the animal over the human side of me. Then again, I am far less likely to get a pet any time soon.