The Mysterious Object

When I first saw this image on my camera roll, I couldn’t remember how it got there. I couldn’t remember where it was, why I had decided to point and shoot, or whether it was just an accidental capture of a mystifying object while I was trying to photograph something else. 

I had a dream and I was walking on this beach and then I suddenly saw this mysterious icon and so I started walking toward it. It was night. And while I was walking toward it (I was a long ways away) I saw some young people all dressed in black and they painted the object with white and blue and green and black and all of this painting seemed as if it were perfectly choreographed. Like they had done this painting of this object hundreds of times. Or maybe they had practiced this 100 times. The work was dance-like, a choreography so specific and intentional that the weight of what they were doing, what they were saying felt so much more important. (If indeed they were saying anything. And just as I got close enough to see what was happening, close enough to be noticed by them -- I woke up.

But I woke up into another dream. A dream that felt exactly the same as the last one. I was walking on the beach at night in the distance I could see the same object, but at first I didn't recognize it because it contextualized by dozens of objects exactly the this one. These objects lined up symmetrically before and after the object in question and they were all connected through a pier that had been built on top of them.

For two reasons, though, I could see exactly which of the pedestals was the one that I had seen in the earlier dream and the mysterious photograph. For one I could feel with my body that I was walking in exactly the same direction at exactly the same pace in the exact same (mysterious) place in the earlier dream. The second evidence was that standing atop the pier were two men wearing clothes that indicated that we were in the 1920s or 1930s. They argued about something very very important. One of them gestured to the pedestal below. The other disagreed. Arms crossed . Head shaking. Just when I was almost close enough to hear what they were saying, I woke up.

And, you'll guess it, I woke up into another dream. The same walk, the same beach, the same nighttime but now there was no glow of civilization nearby. There was a man though drawing the pier the that I had seen in the last dream. He had an architect's table and he was drawing the pier around the pedestal which now -- to my shock looked exactly as it had looked before the beautiful mysterious paintings, the illegible black letters from another world. The architectural plans were complete and he looked at them with great joy. Walking up to touch the mysterious object again, walking back to again look at the drawings and just as I was almost close enough to recognize the face of the architect, to my shock, a shot rang out from the far darkness to my left, I swung my gaze but saw nothing in the shadows and when I looked back, the architect was falling. He had been shot. And as I started to run toward him to offer some help,

I woke up. Into yet another dream. The same spot exactly. The same pace of walking in the night air, but (I was just as surprised as you will be) floating in the sky was a massive UFO. And I truly use the word "UFO" because I could not identify what it was. It reminded me of the 3D elephant puzzle in my father's office when I was a child. Almost impossible to solve small hand sized perfect rectangle blocks with notches and varying links that could slide together into various forms and at the apex of achievement would become an elephant. This floating structure was not made of wood, though. The metallic looking color tipped my context cues into imagining that it was solid at first but the longer you looked the more it looked as if it could be something akin to gas and a line of "sparks" connected the vehicle to the mysterious pedestal the "sparks" shimmered but in the same way that the object itself pulsed with the same undefinable essence in the UFO. As I got closer I saw there was one human who had been knocked down onto the stand and he was watching the pulsing machine with awe. His clothes looked centuries old. And the more I could make out his features the more I feared that he was me. Or that I was him.

I woke up in my bed and the strangest thing was that I remembered exactly where I had seen the object. I was eating a California Style Burrito at Ocean Beach with my lifelong friend Dave and we were talking about new insights, unexpected things that haunted us, so much later in life than we thought those things would recur. Near the end of the conversation I saw the object and was drawn to it, and never even noticed the unusual markings on it until later when I looked at it, pinch zoomed in and saw their meticulous detail. It could be a gallery object or the altar in a church full of relics. I strained and strained, but I have never been able to remember any of the dreams I had that night. I even have a sense that I wrote it all down in great detail, but I've looked everywhere and can't find it.

Maybe enigmas allow us to expand our capacity for curiosity, hope, fear, ambition. Who knows what might come of an enigma like this object? An enigma like this disappearing dream that I may never recover?