IJ study archive

Hal's tennis-court dream — "In this dream, which every now…"

quote

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public.

Context

Hal's recurring dream itself: the court grown gargantuan and its lines — the map of legal play — metastasized into illegibility, with a crowd watching him fail to find where service goes. The companion nightmare to 019's face in the floor: both recurring, both about something wrong with the ground you're supposed to stand on.

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