Treat Hall / 1800 N Pontiac

Click for map: Treat Hall / 1800 N Pontiac / lat 39.74520590625679 lon -104.90429621199603

Call 720-845-5413 extension 366 to hear this dream.

Silence has filled everything around you, like a great fog blotting out all noise. Cars & buses pass on the street, students open & close their mouths, a person in a hardhat presses a jackhammer down to the crackling cement, but none of it makes a sound. People look around in confusion, & then fear. They open their mouths wide into what would be screams, but only perfect, unbroken silence persists. In the uncertainty of the vast silence animals creep out of their hiding places, squirrels & feral cats & foxes & deer fill the sidewalks & trot alongside the humans. You clap your hands together & you feel the impact on your palms, but they make no noise. You try to say your own name, but what comes out could be anything, or nothing. And as the dream progresses through its cavernous silence, you also have another dream, a parallel dream set in this dream’s future, a dream of the legacy of The Great Silence, how children at dinner tables decades from now eagerly ask their parents what they did during The Great Silence, how they survived The Great Silence, & the parents take a deep breath before they respond. And inside the children & the parents, blood pulses & stomach acid gurgles & lungs heave & inflate & dark organs bleat & fizz & bones slowly reconstruct themselves out of the matter of the exterior world. Even inside the body, there is so much noise. And instead of answering the child the parent begins to sing a little song, nothing more than a chant, nothing more than a prayer. And then you are back in the first dream, on the sidewalk. Traffic has snarled to a stop. The drivers have gone slack & unresponsive. Two bear cubs rush from nearby bushes, followed by a wary mamma bear. An elk with shreds of bloody velvet hanging from tangled horns hops onto the hood of a car, then onto the roof, hooves denting the metal. And you can feel how The Great Silence has spread over the whole country, the whole world. All the air undisturbed by any noise. You step forward & your foot kicks something. Looking down, you find a box full of bells. You lift the box & in the silence that towers over all things, you just barely, almost, maybe, possibly hear a bell chime. You shake the box, but you do not hear the chiming again. Or maybe, just maybe, you do? You hold the box to your chest & rush about the sidewalk, handing a bell to each person, & instructing them to wait, hanging bells off the elk’s horns, tangling bells in the bears’ fur, giving the raccoons & geese & squirrels each their own bell & then, when you’ve handed out all the bells. You raise you hand high in to the air, then lower it, shaking your own bell with all your might. And all around you people & animals swing or shake or tap or hammer their bells furiously. But despite all this bell activity, The Great Silence remains unbroken. Until, faintly, so quiet you almost don’t believe it, you hear your heart beating, ba-dum, ba-dum. And then, all around you, as people shake & swing their silent bells, you hear the faint thumps, so quiet but in the vast silence audible, the thumps of each creature’s & human’s heart.