PLAYING CHESS WITH DEATH

I dreamed that I was a knight who has sworn eternal blood-brotherhood to another knight. But each of us has sworn fealty to a rival monarch and we have been commanded to kill each other. Instead, we are playing a game of chess, each carefully trying to figure out a way to delay the killing blow.

This was in fact a long and complex dream and I woke up thinking I MUST remember, I MUST remember, and one thing in particular is that there were three "conditions" in the dream, and one concerned two words that were circled on a lined page, written in a gorgeous round hand. Those words are gone from my memory completely.

All that remains is that final scene of the two knights sitting across a chessboard. It's like a double-vision edition of THE SEVENTH SEAL.