This morning I caught a dream in the little web I leave hanging on my bedpost. #$%@! What do you think you’re doing?! Whoa. I stepped back. The dream threw a handful of porcupine needles at me. Let me go! The frayed threads of my web were thrumming with an otherworldly sound. It assaulted me with magnetic disco cubes, and a plague of flying piranhas, – I covered my head – ten thousand screeching toenails on a chalkboard, and a gale force vacuum cleaner. I backed towards the door in fear. The dream was swearing without restraint, threatening me with an iron wok and seventeen sharpened HB pencils, singeing my eyebrows, and, in essence, trying to take my entire home apart. I reached for the doorknob. It exploded in an impressive display of fireworks. So did my bedside lamp and my cat’s tail. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the little fiend revving up for another attack, and ducked just in time to miss a spurt of foul green phlegm, which caught my poor cat squarely in the face. The substance made a nasty sizzling sound. Screaming in fury, she pounced on the dreamcatcher, sinking her teeth into whatever was the source of this uncalled-for wrath. I took my chance and sprinted out the door – now hanging on half a hinge, not stopping until I reached my office.

When I returned that evening, after hours of brooding fear, cautiously, with a make-shift umbrella shield, I peered into the devastated bedroom.

Silence.

A summer breeze, heavy with the scent of lilacs and sea salt, wafted through the weak November sunlight that straggled through the curtains.

The dream was silent.

then it reached out, and I saw a rose, blackened by death’s thorns
fight its way through a mountain of white sand
I felt a child’s laugh spread
like a butterfly through a pasture of sheep
I heard the fuzziness of a shell and drank
clouds out of a starry basin

and then I saw more
I saw cedars walking past me on
the feet of eternity
and a dull moon replacing a dead sun
only as bright as
a stranger’s eyes

I saw loneliness.
I saw nostalgia.
I became the dream,
and it took me
to become
patches of sunlight chasing
each other across cobblestones,
to become the music of falling
stars,
to become a yellow balloon reaching
(for the sky).

to become

Free.


When I woke up, the dream was gone.