A Song of Love and Regret

So far from home, and yet I seem to know all these people. I think it's a wedding and that I should know all the people here but don't. The women all seem to have white faces though I think they have been crying as well. And at the centre, a stiff and tall woman, dressed in white, crammed into an expensive dress and looking really unhappy. Later I will browse through hundreds of photos of her that have all been transmitted to me from the various mobile phones. In all of them she is crying. I am told that this is because she is consumptive and that the knowledge of her impending deterioration trumps any happiness that being married might bring her. There is no sign of her future husband. I want to do something to help - the truth of modern medicine gives me hope but I want to do the saving myself and I am not a doctor so I just leave her to suffer. The guilt is overwhelming. I know that it being a wedding we should be happy but the unearthly behaviour and the standard lack of walls and ceilings a-la Dogville, leaves me unable to act on anything apart from spooling through the photos which now seem limitless, an infinity of images, never repeating, never ending and in all of them, this same sad woman. Maybe she is the White Queen.

This is some sort of factory, a clean and deserted collection of pipes and machinery between tall, corrugated buildings. The passageways are marked by jets of steam. Despite there being no one about I search, possibly for the sad bride but I feel that it is more likely something far more intangible, obviously suggesting that the woman represents something other than an afflicted human being. I begin crying at my inability to determine what this search is for and it makes me sad now in the same way. I have things to do, valves to turn, walkways to cross and nothing goes right. No machinery will behave as it is supposed to and I am stuck in places I know will not reveal the object of my search. These frustrations end the dream, for the anger that it all brings becomes real ire, a boiling inside that wakes me up in the dark and familiar room. The usual relief floods in like ink in clear water and is quickly followed by a different colour, the blue fug of drowsiness and I sleep until morning.