The Co-Vivid Dream

From Oleron’s “pith-white walls” to Alan’s single paragraph of “The walls are all white.”

 

THE DREAM by A.J. Alan

 

“It’s one of those clocks which pretend they haven’t got any works, like the women of the present day.”

…with due apologies to all women, except perhaps to this story’s more subtly beckoning one?
A very strong premonition, perhaps the strongest, of one of our co-vivid dreams today. As well as that ‘co-‘ bit, the fact that it does not follow the “proper rules” of a normal dream (of which AJA gives one example as a comparison*), but a co-vivid dream is “abnormally normal”, and this recurring co-vivid dream depicts a situation timed — inside the dream by an actual clock — to when you start dreaming the dream in real-time outside it. This co-vivid dream depicts a moving population of men attending as an audience to a ‘graceful’ woman in a hat and a simple futuristic black frock who inaudibly interviews them one by one, dream by dream, on the stage where she is seated. The so-called “purest coincidences” that follow in real-time outside the dream are chilling and indeed so-called! I shall now name this type of co-vivid dream aftermath-in-real-time as the Ribblechick Syndrome…

“Oh, it’s a vivid dream all right.”

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*The ‘normal’ dream comparison is of another woman – this time an old beggar and hideous – who claims the coins you find within rocky “interstices” to belong to her!

 

The full context of the above is here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/the-3rd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/