Only part of him was ahead of the clock… At first, when the moment exploded before him, Dunne, could think not of the future, nor of what had gone before. Just like the dream he could only gaze at the smoke rising up the hill in the field holding up the lightning tree, which would come into view much sooner if it wasn’t for the hindering heavy snow underfoot. Basil barked and raced ahead in leaps and bounds, his ears flapping as he took the air. Occasionally he would turn, tail wagging, as if to say, speed up or the spectacle might be over before we get there.
From the fact that the smoke reached higher than the tree-line beyond the large pond Dunne could tell where the car had come to a halt.
The low hill, an upside down hollow, sat as the shadow twin of the Hilltop housing St John’s triangular ship sail, at most times appearing as a dark silhouette against the sky, but today the sail on the horizon was white, the signal that Minotaur had been defeated and Theseus had navigated his escape from the subterranean underworld using the coloured thread.
In the dream there was an almighty… wow… yes just like that, and following the bang… yes, there was the ball of flame shooting darker smoke into the original white cloud.
Would the scene be exactly the same as the dream? He kept looking to the left hoping that the base of the treeline to the pond might be visible. In the dream a dark shape glided at speed from right to left towards the point. In the dream it was more like a rolling smudge of charcoal on paper, like the eye make up of the waitress at the Dream Cafe, that’s a different dream, she won’t be working there for twenty years, he knew that by the date on the newspaper which she always places on his table as she picks Basil up, it always says 1993. The date on this morning’s paper was 1973, the exact date of the newspaper in the dream. The scene before him felt different to the landscape of his vision, in which he saw shadow figures moving through a Breugal painting trapped inside a silent snow globe.