The second dream I remember from that earliest time was far darker; perhaps for all its simplicity it could be called nightmare. This one reappeared, within a new dream, a night ago.
In the original vision, I was a child underground in a long, very long tunnel. It was of damp stone, ancient, low and rectangular, stretching away into darkness behind and before. There was no visible source of light; it was a blackness in which I could yet see. Far, far ahead of me, and drawing steadily away, was a tall black figure, whom I knew to be my mother. She was remote, and vanishing, and did not know that I was there.
I do not now remember whether I stood and watched her dwindle, knowing there was no hope, or whether I moved forward. But soon I heard a slow and regular drip, drip. I saw to my right and ahead a bucket by the wall of the tunnel. Above the bucket, hanging from a hook by its white, white hair, was a paper-white and severed head, dripping, drop by drop its wine red blood, the only color present in that black-gray realm. It was a solemn and strangely meditative head, oval, almost stylized, rather like the head of a Buddha. Detached, you might say, in more ways than one.
Nonetheless it woke me.
This has always been to me The Dream of the White Head. It was one of those which impress beyond the telling, by an atmosphere not conveyable. It has come back to mind, for obvious reasons, since my mother’s death last year.
A night ago, I dreamt that someone showed me a drawing, in black ink. At first it made little sense. Turning the paper, I saw that it was of a tunnel. Looking longer, holding it up, it shifted in a vertiginous moment like an M. C. Escher image, gaining real, sinking perspective of a sudden, and I saw it resembled The Tunnel, where the White Head hangs. At once upon this thought I also perceived the Head, with its bucket, a tiny scribble in black, but most definitely there.
Whereupon, I woke again.
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Forest Rogers : Fantastic Beings