The act takes place inside one of the tentacles of a gigantic octopus. The tentacles are spirals into which we, the audience, are gradually lowered. The stage play resembles a grand, lavish film production of some great epic, yet with something of The Waste Land in its narrative atmosphere.
As we are drawn down into this spiral, it feels like a surreal amusement park, as though a new episode of the great play is now beginning. We experience the spiralling descent into this tentacle (one of seven?) which eventually reveals itself to be the path of the sense of smell. The act seems to bear a title along the lines of “The Perfection of Smell”, or something similar (see below).
Slowly, images emerge of shells, mussels, oysters and other sea creatures reminiscent of the Cambrian Explosion. The entire atmosphere becomes like an aquarium, and at times a small pebble beach outside a sea cave.
At last we see human hands holding an enormous spiral shell in sharp focus, while, slightly out of focus, the faces of primitive-looking people clothed in hides gradually become visible. They hold the shell with great reverence and expressions of sacred awe.
Instead of bringing it to their ears as one would expect, they raise it to their nostrils and inhale deeply all the scents of the sea emanating from it. I myself could perceive a divine fragrance of the ocean rising into my senses within the dream.
They were seized in the deepest corners of their souls by delight and ecstasy as they inhaled the shell’s fragrances, praising it as something divine. It was then that a deep voice declared:
“This is the Perfection of Smell.”
The voice referred to the shell as the Cosmic Shell.
We were also informed that pure, fresh mother’s milk was the lubricant of this world.
The play was dramaturgically perfect, suggestive and utterly captivating. We are drawn into it with a kind of profound revelation, as though witnessing an episode from a play revealing some higher truth about existence and the universe.
I become so overwhelmed by the atmosphere and the truth conveyed by the play that I urge the other spectators:
“We simply have to get this play performed in a theatre in Altais!”
Everyone agrees. (It seems as though we are attending some gigantic dream festival somewhere in Northern Arcania.)
Yet I know that this particular act is only a small fragment of the entire play, in which perhaps each sense is represented by one tentacle of the great octopus that is the All in One Universe.
For some reason I felt compelled to make an urgent phone call after the play had ended. But, as so often in dreams, this proved impossible because of a malfunctioning mobile phone (Dream Sign). For a few seconds I was on the verge of becoming lucid, but then I awoke abruptly and immediately wrote down the notes above.
Reflection upon awakening: Over the past few nights, we had seen the whole play at the strange festival. Tonight, I woke during one act and quickly wrote down what I could. The earlier dreams had faded almost at once after waking. This time, perhaps because of the malfunctioning phone, one fragment remained long enough to make it onto the page.
REMSEARCH observation: The timing and apparent irrelevance of the malfunctioning mobile phone suggest that the appearance of Dream Signs may not always be incidental, but may sometimes function as a prompt toward lucidity. Whether such prompts arise deliberately, or are induced by an external source, remains unknown.
