Such, then, was the first image, the beginning, from which the dream unfolded. Around me something would be waiting for permission, for my say-so, for an inner go-ahead, and I knew, or rather something inside of me knew, that I ought not to yield to this unaccountable impulse, because the more I silently promised, the more terrible the end would be. Though really I did not know this, because if I had I’d probably have been afraid, and I never felt any fear. I waited. From the pink mist enveloping me there emerged the first touch, while I, inert as a block of wood, enmired deep in whatever it was that seemed to have locked me in, was unable to retreat or even move, while that other thing examined my prison by touch, seeing and unseeing at the same time; and it already seemed to be a hand that was creating me; up till that moment I lacked even sight and now I could see — beneath the fingers that roamed about my face, out of nothingness there emerged my lips, cheeks, and as that touch, broken down into a thousand infinitely tiny parts, began to go further, I already had a face and a breathing torso, summoned to existence by this symmetrical act of creation; for I myself, being created, was creating in turn, and a face was coming into view that I had never seen before, foreign and familiar, I tried to look into its eyes, but I was unable to, because the proportions were constantly being changed, there were no directions here, we were simply discovering one another in rapt silence and mutually becoming, and I was already my living self, though boundlessly enhanced, and that other being — a woman? — remained motionless with me. A pulse filled us and we were one, and then all at once the languor of this scene, beyond which nothing existed nor seemed able to, began to be infiltrated by something unutterably cruel, impossible, and unnatural. The same touch that had created us and had clung to our bodies with an invisible golden cloak began to pullulate. Our bodies, naked and white, started to flow, blackening into streams of writhing vermin that emerged out of us like air, and I was — we were — I was a glistening, febrile mass of wormlike motion, tangling and untangling, but never-ending, infinite, and in that boundlessness — no! — I who was the boundlessness, I howled in silence, asking to be extinguished, asking for an end, but it was exactly at this moment I would run off in every direction at once and gather back together in the form of a suffering that was more vivid than any waking state, multiplied a hundredfold, concentrated in black and red distances, now hardening into rock, now rising to a crescendo somewhere in the glow of another sun or another world.
This was the simplest of the dreams; the others I’m unable to recount, because the sources of terror pulsating within them had no counterpart in waking awareness. In them I knew nothing of the existence of Harey, but nor did I find in them any memories or experiences from the preceding day.
There were also other dreams in which, in darkness a congealed to the point of lifelessness, I felt myself to be the object of experiments being conducted slowly and painstakingly, without the use of any sensory implements; they involved being penetrated and taken to pieces and rubbed away into utter emptiness, and the underlying foundation of all these silent, destroying crucifixions was a fear the very recollection of which, in the daytime, made my heart race.
The days, undifferentiated and as if faded, filled with wearying ill will towards everything, inched by in extreme apathy; it was only the nights that I was afraid of, not knowing how I could save myself from them. I stayed awake with Harey, who had no need of sleep; I kissed her and caressed her, but I was aware that I wasn’t doing it either for her or for myself, that it was all because I was frightened of sleep. Though I didn’t say a word to her about my ghastly nightmares, she must have guessed something was up, because I sensed in her little deaths a consciousness of unrelenting humiliation, and there was nothing I could do about it. I mentioned before that the whole time I saw neither Snaut nor Sartorius. But Snaut would get in touch every few days, sometimes with a note, but more often by summoning me to the telephone. He would ask if I hadn’t seen anything new, any kind of change, something that could be interpreted as a reaction elicited by the so frequently repeated experiment. I would say no, and ask him the same question. Snaut would merely shake his head in the depths of the screen.
On the fifteenth day after the operation had been discontinued I woke earlier than usual, so exhausted by my bad dream that it felt like I was coming out of heavy sedation. Through the uncovered window, in the first light of the red sun, whose immense reflection sliced the smooth ocean in two with a river of crimson fire, I noticed how the surface, inert up till now, was imperceptibly becoming ruffled. It blackness initially grew paler, as if it had been covered by a fine layer of mist, but the mist itself had an entirely material consistency. Here and there points of turbulence appeared, till the vague movement spread to the entire expanse in sight. The blackness vanished, concealed beneath membranes that were bright pink where they bulged out and pearly brown in their hollow places. The colors, which alternated to begin with, decorating this strange covering of the ocean with long strips that seemed to freeze in place during the movement of the waves, then mingled together, and the entire ocean was coated by a foam of large bubbles that rose upwards in huge sheets both immediately beneath the Station and all around it. From every side at once, tissue-winged foam-clouds rose into the empty crimson sky; they extended horizontally, quite unlike real clouds, with thick bulbous edges. The ones whose horizontal streaks obscured the low disk of the sun were, in contrast to its glow, black as coal; others, in the vicinity of the sun, depending on the angle at which the rays from the east struck them, lit up cherry red or amaranthine purple, and this process went on as if the ocean were peeling in a series of bloody contour lines, every so often being blanketed with a new coating of hardened foam. Some of these formations floated up very close, right outside the windows, passing only a few feet away, and at a certain moment one of them brushed against the glass with its silky-looking surface, while the multitudes that had risen into the air first were barely visible by now, far up in the sky like scattered birds, dissolving at the zenith in a transparent precipitate.