As I lay in bed this morning, I found myself inhabiting a strange world where creatures walked on their hind legs, and had relationships with one another, and built peculiar structures from synthetic materials, and devised elaborate ways to manage their understandings of space, and time, and mortality.
As I wandered about this place, I felt as if I were in a labyrinthine art gallery with infinite wall space; the paintings all alive and animate with the landscapes and objects they depicted.
The paintings did not know that they were only paintings, mere imitations of life; and the scenes caught by brush and stroke moved and breathed in a grotesque mockery of their two-dimensionality, ignorant of their frames' constraints.
I haunted in an idle daze through the echoing belly of the endless curation - surely the most exquisite and elaborate amassing of masterpieces ever known to humankind - and I lingered my gaze upon the various depictions of life with all the sombre detachment of an accomplished art enthusiast; silently drifting past the works which left me unmoved, and pausing by the ones that hungered at the intangible intellect of my soul to reflect, ponderously, upon the artists' intent.
Oh there were all manner of styles present. Abstract, impressionist, romantic, modernist, post-modern. But those that sang the strongest lure, riveting my attention like Odysseus amid the sirens were the realists: all green and brown and beige and crimson, they caught in snapshots all things mundane: blank faced figures chopping wood, playing cards, drawing a bath, staring.
It woozily began to feel as if I had one foot in their world; and the longer I looked, the more it seemed as if they knew I was there, watching them like a voyeur. That if I whispered, they would hear my words rolling like a breeze along the hills, bristling through the leaves in an imitation of syllables, whistling up cracks in floorboards like the sighing of dying memories.
Or perhaps it was more like this: although unaware of the gallery from which I appraised them, my detachment was not absolute - the paintings were cognizant of me, could somehow see me - and I existed as surely in their paintings as they; an unseen figure beyond the frame, behind the canvas.
I wondered then if perhaps there might not be another painting, hung somewhere else, of a thin, lone figure walking through an infinite gallery of bleaching white surfaces, dwarfed by enormous works of art, unaware of its own flimsy dimensions, and unaware that it, too, was being contemplated.