Dreamtime

Sometimes when I awake in the dark I can feel the physical presence of dreams. Almost if I reach out, I could possibly touch them. They are living entities these dreams, so vivid, so real!!

While the day is not yet dawned and the dogs have not yet come creeping into my room. I can almost hear the dream breathing, can feel the shade of its shadow, and feel as it lays me gently down. The warm bed receives my weight and the dream leaves me to find my waking equilibrium.

Sometimes the visions flit quickly, birdlike, the reverie gone and forgotten. Other times the dream strolls away, great lumbering beast of the alternate slumbering world, glancing over its shoulder with a sigh.

Not all dreams are kind, not all are benevolent, but thankfully I am not often visited by succubae or cruel and frightening monsters. Most of my dreams are about the things I cannot see, or say, or read.

Puzzles I cannot calculate, words I don’t understand. People that I do not know, deeds I would seldom contemplate doing. Some times they are erotic and other times morbid.

In my dreams I work hard to read a line of print, and the visions that follow blow wide the blue horizon, flings the sky to the stars, with a sensation of flying headlong into the depths, until the spaces between the stars become filled with the crystalline souls of those who have first atoned and then suffered judgment.

The entirety of truth barely visible from the corners of my eyes, I can understand the ephemeral and the eternal.

I am weightless and rocketing a hundred thousand miles an hour and then I falter and breathe and settle and slowly open my eyes to see the dull yellow arc of a streetlight shining through the window on the ceiling, and hear a low train song whistling in the night.

Usually it is then that I wake up and realize that I had been dreaming. The act of waking up, is the last breath of a dream, exhaled.