The story of The Dreaming Pools
The Dreaming Pools are beside the waterfall, not in it. The fall is the loud thing in the middle; the Pools are the quiet edge, where the water seeps off the rock face and gathers in a stair of small shallow clay basins, each one spilling gently into the one below. Nothing here is deep. Nothing here is anything anybody could fall into. It is small and it is tranquil and that is the entire specification. It is also the one place in the world where the picture and the sound are the same idea. A waterfall’s flank is many small water sources at different pitches — a drip into a shallow basin is a high note, a sheet sliding over a mossy lip is a low one — all of them continuous, and not one of them an event. That matters more than it sounds. A bell has an attack; a chime has an attack; a thing that starts is a thing that wakes you. A drip does not start. It has been going the whole time. And it stacks. The drip comes round every seven seconds, the trickle every eleven, the deeper fall every thirteen, so the three of them do not land together again for hours. The Pools drift for the same reason the pictures do, and by the same arithmetic. The dreams the name promises are kept honestly. A dream here is a colour resting in a pool, and it is never a picture, because a picture is a story and a story has an ending and an ending is an event.
Stories from The Dreaming Pools
Nothing from here has been published yet. The Dreaming Pools is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.