I often dream of a gray snow mountain, grayer and vaster than any snow mountain I have ever dreamed of. Once, I dreamed of it continuously for months, trekking day after day across a rock on the southern slope, never making it out. One night I decided to rest, only to wake and find myself buried in a boundless expanse of gray. I dug for two months. Sometimes a black passage would appear, dotted with specks of light like a starry sky, but the gray wind would seal it shut in an instant.
I could only hold my ground on that rock. In truth, I didn't know it was a rock—during those two months of trekking, I seemed at certain moments to have reached the edge of its thousand-fathom abyss. Its contours looked like stone. Just like the stones I could see in the gray hurricane on the snow mountain, far away.
On some of those stones were dark-headed figures, moving slowly within my line of sight on the scale of months. Sometimes these black figures would pass quickly by me, leaving food and firewood like the Red Army crossing the grasslands, then walking away with their packs at great speed. When they approached, they grew from distant, tiny black lines into towering black pillars; when they left, their footprints in the snow were so enormous it was as though they had walked away with all my paths.
But by the next day, everything would vanish. The flat gray was smoother than snow, more like flour, and walking through it felt like flour too—each step raised a gray dust that concealed everything below the knees. The perspective of these gray snow mountain dreams was extraordinarily distant. The vastness of the gray and the smallness of me formed a cold contrast that made me worry constantly about supplies. The dark-headed troops never seemed to miss their deliveries, never leaving me without food or kindling, but they also never said when they would come next.
Once, within the gray snow mountain dream, I had a lucid dream. This allowed me to fly up and survey the gray snow mountain from above: on the whole, it appeared to be ring-shaped, but no matter how high I flew, I could only see a small fraction of its enormous circumference—judging from the curvature, roughly on the order of one hundredth of a circle, just barely enough to discern that it should be a circle. I tried to fly higher to clear the mountain's summit, but from the waist of the mountain upward, the mountain body began to fade, dissolving into a boundless gray that made you lose all sense of direction. Then I tried to fly downward, but soon it became like the falling dreams of childhood: at first, a plunge into a bottomless black, then gradually the sensation of acceleration and all visual reference disappeared, leaving me unable to feel speed or direction. Those black dreams weren't so bad—usually you'd just wake up frightened, and my mother would say it meant I was growing. The gray dreams were worse. Immersed in that gray where you couldn't see your hand before your face, you simply could not wake up. Slowly you felt yourself disappearing. The image became pure gray, then pure light, and then you woke, not startled or drowsy at all, as if you hadn't dreamed at all. But if you closed your eyes at that moment, there it was again—that boundless gray.
Once I tried to change direction. Rather than circling the base of the mountain, I would climb upward. The slopes that looked so close and imposing—I could never reach them. The ground beneath my feet was always flat. Sometimes, in a hallucination, I saw flickering black dots that might have been the dark-headed troops, but they never came again. Strangely, from the moment they stopped coming, I was never hungry or cold again. I walked like this for two months. Whenever I shifted my perspective, it felt as though I hadn't moved at all. The rock had vanished. The black dots had vanished. All that remained was a gray smoke, imperceptibly deepening, slowly rising from my knees upward.
The last time I dreamed of the gray snow mountain, I was no longer in the scene. There was nothing at all. Within the gray, there seemed to be the faintest outline of a snow mountain. When I tried to focus on certain places, searching for something, the gray snow mountain slowly brightened. As the image grew brighter, even that trace of the mountain's outline disappeared. Light lost its opposite entirely, and accompanied by a soaring soundtrack, it became a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree surround of pure nothingness.