Instrument

This is what I dreamed on the first night of 2008 under the influence of many consecutive days of drinking and staying up until 4AM:

I lived in a small village or town in the mountains. Near the village, there was a canyon, narrow and deep, with a swift creek running through the bottom. Across the two sides of the canyon hung a network of heavy iron chains, criss-crossing the thin air between the sheer stone cliffs like a colossal spiderweb.

I would climb out onto these chains into the heart of the metal web in the middle of the canyon and deliberately entangle my body in the chains, suspended hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, less like a spider and more like a fly. Then, I would twist my body and my limbs, jostling the chains to produce jangly tones that resonated within the canyon, and I could coordinate my movements to produce tuned "notes," melody, harmony, and eventually music. It was as though the chains, the canyon, and I had all combined to form one colossal instrument of geological proportions. And I was apparently a virtuoso of this "instrument"; dangling in mid-air above a plunge to certain death, trapped in chain-link metal webbing, and free-spinning in 360 degrees around each of three different axes while "playing" orchestrated combinations of "notes" felt utterly natural in my dream. The music's movement was the instrument's movement was my movement. I was a guitar string. I was a saxophone reed. I was the wind in church organ pipes. I didn't "play" the instrument or the music; I was all these things.

Anyway, it seemed that the music I made with the instrument was quite beautiful (though I cannot remember what it sounded like, exactly), and the townsfolk enjoyed it immensely. But one day I either decided to stop playing the instrument or start playing music on it that was different from what I had played before. This made the townsfolk very angry, and they formed a mob to drag me out into the wasteland and put me to death.