Never has a single character so featured in my dreams. I dreamt of him again last night. I was in a house in the suburbs and had been brought there through a chase of some kind in which I was the pursuer. Whatever the issue was, it had been resolved and I had a sense of relief. I was in the lounge room, talking with some young guys who I vaguely knew and was aware that they were in their early twenties and that this was a share house, not unlike the ones I had lived in at around the same age. As we are talking I see through a doorway into a room of another of the houses’ residents, a resident that has not been involved in whatever conflict has occurred earlier. The bed and the objects on the desk seem familiar to me and I experience a sense of déjà vu. I walk from the lounge room into the room and see sitting on a chair a young man who looks remarkably like Max except that he, like his housemates, is in his early twenties, the wrong age for the Max I knew. In the dream I am aware that Max is dead. This, in fact, seems a constant in all the dreams I have of him. Somehow I always know he is dead. I notice how organised and precise everything is arranged in this room and at first I just chat with this seeming doppelganger but eventually I ask him his name. “Max,” he tells me. I am taken aback and he notices and says, “That’s right. Max Flory.” I am confused and elated and horrified. He clearly doesn’t know me. I consider how this house is just like the type of share house we all lived in at this age and yet it was different, alternate. This Max is just like ‘our Max’ but is somehow also different. I know it is not ‘our Max’ of the past. I feel some kind of relief but am more bewildered. I consider whether I should try and explain to him my knowledge of the life of the other Max, perhaps even warn him of the potential for an early death, encourage him to go and see a doctor. First, however, I think that I need to take a photo of him on my phone for the express reason of sending it to Den but for some reason can’t get my phone to photograph him. Here the dream unceremoniously ends.
Max's death is a problem that my brain keeps trying to solve.
mplumber
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"A sculptor was selling a white marble statue of Hermes which two men wanted to buy: one of them, whose son had just died, wanted it for the tombstone, while the other was a craftsman who wanted to consecrate the statue to the god himself. It was getting late, and the sculptor had not yet sold the statue. He agreed that he would show the statue again to the men when they came back the next morning. In his sleep, the sculptor saw Hermes himself standing at the Gate of Oneiroi. The god spoke to him and said, ‘Well, my fate hangs in the balance: it is up to you whether I will become a dead man or a god!’"
Aesop, Fables 563 (from Babrius 30)
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