RAMON ATILA’S DREAM JOURNAL #8

 

RAMON ATILA’S DREAM JOURNAL #8

The metro car hummed a low, electric song, the sound of it vibrating up through the soles of my small shoes. I was a child again, my hand held firmly in my mother’s. It was that specific kind of hold, the one that says I’ve got you, but don’t wander. We had come from the Biodome. My head was still full of it—the warm, thick air of the tropical forest, the flash of a scarlet ibis, the slow, deliberate blink of a sloth hanging upside down in the artificial twilight. It was a dream of a place, a world under a glass roof.

The Biodome was connected to the metro. You walked through one set of doors and you were in the jungle, and then you walked through another and you were in the long, tiled tunnel that led to the platform. The smell changed from damp earth to the clean, electric scent of ozone and brake dust. The metro in my dream was not just a train. It was a vessel, a long metal worm that burrowed not just through the earth, but through time. Each stop was a century. You could see it on the platforms as we slid by, the art on the walls changing like pages in a vast, silent book.

We passed the 1700s, all powdered wigs and minuets in faded posters. The 1800s were a blur of steam engines and stiff portraits. The 1900s were a riot of colour, Marilyn Monroe’s smile, a Warhol print, a grainy image of a man on the moon. My mother didn’t speak. She just held my hand and stared ahead at the map above the doors, the line of lights ticking down from stop to stop.

The train eased into a station that felt different. The air was stiller. On the platform wall was a single, enormous poster. It showed a man, nude, reclining. He had the perfect, muscular body of a god, but his face was serene, almost sleepy. He looked like Adam in the painting on the ceiling of the big church, the one God was about to touch. But here, he was alone. A small crowd of people on the platform stood looking up at him, not with reverence, but with the quiet curiosity of museum-goers.

“Who is that?” I asked, my voice small in the humming silence.

A man standing near us, a passenger with a kind face, answered softly. “That’s Mr. Venus,” he said. “The ideal form. The last classical beauty of the 25th century.”

The doors slid shut. I looked back at Mr. Venus as the train pulled away. He looked lonely up there on his wall, the perfect man in an empty world.

The next stop, the one for the 2500s, was the opposite. The platform was dimmer, and the poster was black. In the centre was a face, pale and gaunt, with eyes that were unsettlingly still. It was the face of Hannibal Lecter, the one from the movies, but here they called him something else. A woman on the platform whispered it to her companion. “Solaris,” she said. “The psychic. He sees all the dark corners of your mind.”

The face on the poster seemed to look right through the train window, through me. It wasn’t about the beauty of the body anymore. It was about the inside of your head, all the quiet, scary places. It was a face that knew things it shouldn’t. I squeezed my mother’s hand tighter.

We didn’t get off there, either. We rode on, past a few more silent, blurred stations, until the train finally stopped. My mother tugged my hand. “This is us,” she said.

The platform was not like the others. It was made of rough, grey stone, like the inside of a pyramid. Great stone blocks rose up around us, and thick, green vines and moss grew in the cracks, spilling down the walls. It felt ancient and forgotten, a place the jungle was slowly taking back. It smelled of wet rock and cool earth. We walked towards the escalator, the only modern thing in this old, stone place. It rose up and up, a metal staircase climbing out of a lost world.

At the top, the dream shifted again. We stepped out of the temple and into a McDonald’s. It was clean and bright, smelling of fried potatoes and warm grease. The floor was chequered, the counters were bright. But the roof was made of glass tiles, and through them you could see the real sky, a deep, soft twilight blue, with one bright star just starting to show.

We sat in a plastic booth with our tray of food. I ate a hamburger. It was good. Simple. Real. My mother sat across from me, sipping her coffee, looking tired but peaceful. The glass roof let in the last of the day’s light. The temple was below us, and the time-train was somewhere under that, and Mr. Venus and Solaris were back there in their own centuries, frozen on their walls. But we were here, in this ordinary place, under the real sky, eating dinner.

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When I woke, the feeling of my mother’s hand in mine lingered for a long moment before it faded. The dream stayed with me, clear as glass.

It seemed to be about the layers of a life. The Biodome was childhood wonder, the beautiful, fake worlds we are shown. The metro was history, the long, rushing tunnel of all that came before us, each era with its own obsession. Mr. Venus was our worship of the physical, the perfect shell. The body beautiful, admired and alone. Solaris was the fear of the mind, the deep, psychic dread of what we are inside, the monster that can lurk in thought.

And then the pyramid. That felt like the past, too. Not a sleek century on a timeline, but a deep, foundational past. The past of old gods and stone, now being reclaimed by nature. It is the ground we build our cities on, the ancient dirt that holds our bones. It is the thing that is always there, underneath the modern world.

And on top of it all, the McDonald’s. The glass roof was the key. It was a place of simple, present comfort. It was the ordinary. The humble. The act of eating a meal with your mother. It was life as it is lived, not as it is displayed in a museum. The roof was glass, not to show a simulated sky or a poster of a god, but the real one. The one star. The real twilight.

The journey was through time, through art, through fear, through the ancient world. But it ended in the present, in the small, sacred act of being human. The ideal man and the psychic monster were just stops along the way. The destination was a cheap meal with the person who held your hand. The dream was a reminder that after all the centuries, all the wonders and all the terrors, what you are really looking for is a glass roof and a view of the real sky.

ATILA