Chapter 5
What was is and always will be again.
Tonight, after a loss of meaning, Grin’s waking corrolary remembers the first time he goes to Dream.
He is in a crib. The crib is in a dark room. The dark room is full of separation anxiety. Grin (then still Grind, or was he ever anyone else?) cries and screams and wails.
His father opens a hidden door. Pale white light from an unseen hallway pours into the room, casts a silhouette of Grin/d’s father.
Grin/d, still incapable of speaking, but capable of hearing, announces his desperation to his father—not his mother, which will through psychoanalytic critique off.
(As a parenthetical statement, the narrator must ask the reader to believe that—yes—Grin/d first felt separated from his father. It was in a stairwell, while his mother held him, that he recognized his father as a different being. And Grin/d was scared and angry that his father was a different being.)
Grin/d’s father tries to reach him, but keeps falling through holes in the floor which only Grin/d can see. And, since he lacks the power to speak truth into others, he can only wail more or less loudly in an attempt to reunite with his father.
But the father cannot understand his child. He only know that his child needs him. And he knows, as only a father in a Dream can, that he must brave the shadows to save his son from the shadows.
The floor of the Dream is a hostile force which only language can defeat. Grin/d cannot speak, and his Dream father cannot grasp te concept.
So the Dream father continues to fall out of the dream, nameless, unknown, unable to help Grin/d reunite with the Timeless Unorder of Unthings.
