Short Fiction: A dream

I have a dream.
In the dream, a man walks on water. Just that.
I wake up terrified and lie in the darkness, calculating impossibilites, until my mind reels off into infinity and I sleep. I dream and wake terrified. The circle of dream and terror repeats itself until dawn brings a measure of sanity back into the world.
In the dream, the man walks neither towards me nor away from me but in some direction without reference to myself. I lie awake and stare into the darkness contemplating the unknowable. And that phrase 'contemplating the unknowable' becomes for me an unfathomable depth of dark water with a glittering, shining surface on which I walk.
It is impossible, of course. I know that. It is a dream and dreams have their own significance. I walk forever on unknown depths uncomprehending but when I think, I sink.

It is a conflation, I am sure, of two stories: The Mirage and The Night Voyage. Events so deeply impressed on men's minds that they tell of them and repeat over and over again until one blurs into the other. Until, by a fireside one night or in a village square one day, they merge. A new story emerges: The Walking On Water. It is fit for purpose, a new species adapted to a changing environment.
You can understand.

The new story says everything they want it to say. It is condensed like evaporated milk. It has all the goodness, just add water. It is sweetened, maybe, to make it more palatable.

One day on the road, Jesus is walking on ahead. His friends are following at a distance. As they follow him, the heat on the road lifts him above mortal earth so that he walks, not on air as you might imagine, but on water, in a dry land. That is miracle enough. It is another Transfiguration. It was what you might expect from such a one: lifted, transformed, ethereal.
You can understand.

And then that night, that other night, out on the lake, he comes to them paddling his own coracle, low in the water, half-seen. It is dark. He stands to greet them. They are terrified. He is perfectly in balance with his craft and with the waves. He is, himself, a blessing; a benediction. He stands there, as it appears, on water and Simon, ever the man of action, climbs over the side of our boat, they say, to bring him in. Throw me the rope, he calls. A night gull cries and the breeze heavy with the day's stillness replies. Jesus punts his boat closer. Peter, Simon Peter, grabs the rim and steps aboard. They stand, for a moment, together balanced there between earth and heaven and then Simon slips or falls or steps or is pushed into the sea. Would Simon, experienced seaman that he is, lose his footing? Who knows? Perhaps he was pushed, playfully or for his presumption, as a lesson. It was night. It was not easy to see. And, anyway, we were busy with other things, they say. All we know is, one minute he was there, the both of them, standing together, the next he was gone, in the drink. Simon Peter, that is, they say. Of course, we haul him out dripping and full of bluster. Jesus steps into the boat. We let the coracle run astern. At least I went to him, he says, Simon, asserting his supremacy. Even if you did get a soaking, we laugh. That's how we remember it, they say. That's how the story is told.

On the road, Peter, James and John go to Jesus where he is walking ahead of them on the dust made water and we see them, too, lifted above the earth in the heat of the afternoon.

Such are the tales, the stories, told over many days and years. It is years now although it seems like only yesterday. And in the telling there emerge new stories fitted for the new age; new truths encapsulated in words, conjured in images, light and fire. And so we listen and hear and understand or maybe we do not hear and do not understand. We get a taste for evaporated milk. We drink it neat not realising that water should be added, or a pinch of salt. The label has rubbed off the tin. We are used to this elixier and we like it. We do not want diluted truths. We are high on the intensity. We forget. We have forgotten the meaning of it all. Our truths are different truths.

I wake up terrified. I will drown. I will drown in the uncomprehensible. The gulf, the enormous gulf beneath me will swallow me whole. I will die. It is an old nightmare, that of falling into a great abyss, only, here, I walk on silver; I walk on light. My feet touch the surface but there is no sense of touching. I walk on glass, moving, molten, cold, liquid glass. I am supported by what I do not understand. It is a dream and dreams have their own reasons. At length, the night is over and morning comes.

Later in the day, I am standing at a junction waiting for the lights to change. I notice, high up on the walls of the building opposite, an advertising hoarding, green and bright. It is advertising communication; High-speed, Broad-band Communication. I do not take in the particulars. How will they hear? I think. The thought appears in my mind out of nowhere, evaporates, reformulates, like cloud on a summer day. How will they hear? How will they know? If someone does not go? It is a chain-reaction inside my head. It is an old familiar path. How will they hear if no one preach? Who will preach if they are not sent? A circular argument; a circle that is made up of event, story, reaction, event. An old story. An old circle.

I stare at the advertising hoarding as if the colour green will give me the answer I need. I miss the lights. They change and  the traffic floods back into the space in front of me: the noise and the motion; grey; a commotion like the sea.
I step up.

For a moment I am there, standing, walking on the surface of the bright movement. Then, the surface breaks and I, for no reason that I can understand, fall and sink into the tumult and am washed away. The traffic ebbs and flows, unreasonable, inevitable, true. And reclaims me to itself.

But, ah!, the mirage!
Remember how we walked that day on the road of summer heat!
How we talked then! How we knew!