Dreams as divine guidance

Dreams as divine guidance is Sergeyich’s belief that God communicates instructions through dreams, a conviction that transforms a frightening image into a reason for decisive action. The dreams connect the unfamiliar figures in a dark wood with the grey bees in a hive; taking that connection as divine direction, Sergeyich destroys the hive with a grenade. The episode leaves the boundary between supernatural warning and a dream shaped by his immediate fears unresolved, even as Sergeyich himself treats the message as clear.

The First Dream: A Path Through the Woods

The first dream begins with Sergeyich gathering mushrooms in autumn. He fills two baskets with birch boletuses and porcini, so many that he no longer bothers with slippery jacks and takes pleasure in crushing russulas underfoot. Only when he turns for home does he wonder where he is: there are no woods near his village. Yet he trusts his legs to lead him back along the way he came, even though they never ask his head for directions.

That confidence turns the return journey into an approach toward a boundary. Sergeyich is curious to reach the edge of the woods and understand how someone could forget crossing from a space of light into darkness. The passage is not simply a way out: it is a transition from one kind of space to another, and he expects the open edge to be brighter even at night, unless clouds hide the moon and stars. As he hurries, the crackle of twigs and cones underfoot becomes a continuous, sad, tense music. When he stops, the sound does not stop with him; it continues from behind, deep in the woods.

The Figures and the Bees

The dream’s familiar sounds become threatening by degrees. Sergeyich’s hands ache beneath the baskets, and as he lowers them the rustling, wind, and crackling swell. The tree trunks seem to move back and forth. Then, within the tense noise, he recognizes a sound he knows and loves: the buzzing of bees. But this is not the clear, gentle buzz he associates with them. It is dense and heavy, and the reassuring familiarity of the sound has become something ominous.

A figure emerges from the invisible darkness into the half-visible woods. It is human-sized but does not belong to a human being: its torso reaches nearly to the ground, while short little legs carry it forward in mincing steps. Sergeyich runs, abandoning both full baskets, and flees toward the exit his legs remember. The dream thus binds the uncanny figure to a landscape of uncertain direction and turns the bees’ familiar presence into a warning. Its images are powerful but not self-explanatory; their significance becomes clearer only when Sergeyich recalls them beside the hives.

From Nightmare to Interpretation

After the dream, Sergeyich wakes in the middle of the night with his forehead wet with sweat and cannot fall asleep again. He rolls onto his stomach, and his right hand reaches out to cover the grenade beneath the edge of the bedspread. The gesture recalls how he had gone to sleep with his palm resting on the weapon, seeking comfort from it after worrying that someone might steal it from his unlocked car and attack him with it. The dream’s fear therefore sits beside a real object and a concrete anxiety, without being reduced to either.

Later, looking at the hive whose bees appear grey to him, Sergeyich recalls an earlier nightmare in which enormous, hunched warrior bees crawled out of a hive like soldiers emerging from a tank turret or underground tunnel and set off on a military mission. He also remembers the figures rising from the dark woods in the latest dream. His recognition joins the two visions: “That was them too, the beekeeper realised.” He concludes that the dreams are not accidents and that God tells people what to do through them.

The Warning Becomes Action

Sergeyich acts on this interpretation by pulling the grey-bee hive toward himself. He loosens the strap holding the officially inspected hive and its neighbour to the bed, then is surprised by how easily he can move the grey hive, as if his arms have regained their former strength. The action gives the dream a material consequence: the frightening figures are no longer only images in sleep but, in Sergeyich’s understanding, a warning attached to a particular hive.

At the hive, uncertainty returns in a different form. Sergeyich wonders whether equipment may have been installed to spy on him and on the war, recalling a television programme about tiny gadgets and struggling to remember the word “nanatechnology.” He backs away with the grenade, which still feels warm, as though alive. After getting used to its weight, he stops about twenty metres from the hive, pulls the pin, tosses the grenade, and throws himself to the ground as in the movies. The explosion presses his face into the dry black earth; a whistle and buzzing pass overhead, and something wet lands on the back of his head. The blast’s physical aftermath is certain, while the dreams’ source and exact meaning remain open.

Meaning and Ambiguity

The belief in divine guidance organizes the episode’s movement from unease to action. The dreams recur in different forms—the warrior bees and the long-bodied figures in the woods—and Sergeyich’s later recollection makes them cohere as a message. What had first appeared as a frightening, obscure spectacle becomes, for him, an instruction to act against the grey bees. His conviction gives the dreams practical authority, but the narrative does not independently confirm a divine intervention.

Instead, the episode sustains a tension between spiritual interpretation and the immediate circumstances of fear. Sergeyich sleeps with a grenade under his hand, has recently imagined its use, and encounters military imagery in his nightmare; the grey bees are also associated with a hive he sees as uncanny. Those circumstances offer a grounded context for the visions without disproving his belief. The dreams function as a bridge between the warlike imagery in his imagination and the explosive act he carries out in waking life: a private interpretation becomes consequential in the world beyond sleep.