A Dream Between a Dream

It is getting dark. Our thoughts have wandered in and out for hours, until the twilight sun recedes underneath the gnarled branches of Sycamore trees. Light trickles down onto the porch where we sit. Shadows form smooth contours around us. There is a long silence, and a quiet seems to settle down onto the darkening world, as if taking a long breath. It is a comfortable quiet, however, not one filled with such unease of unspoken words, for there are words betweeen us, through silent little thoughts.

            Time draws out slowly, like the careful stroke of an artists’ brush. Wisps of effervescent smoke drifting lazily upward, dissolving, separating into an infinite sky, though never entirely becoming nonexistant, never entirely leaving. That is what the two of us silently speak of. Infinity is something that just is, something that exists though not quite. It is something in the middle, something ephemeral, esoteric, and ethereal. For some reason the particular word has come up often in our quiet conversation. Eternity, perhaps, meaning what we have been such for eternity, an everlasting hope that exceeds even the seemingly permanent world.

            I am not entirely sure that I am real. Nor do I believe that we are here in this place. It could be a dream. There is no evidence for that, though it is just simply a feeling, something whispering softly in the back of my head, telling me that silence doesn’t really exist, and nor do I. But what I feel, is that we are real, in our true forms, our spiritual forms. We are in a place that has been crafted in our minds, a new world, perhaps, created by the love that has seemed to blossom overnight. I feel a warm presence all along the line of trees, bordering a stream that sings a constant song of trickling water and chirping frogs; the presence lingers and remains like the very hands of God.

            You reach out and touch lightly the top of my hand, which is resting firmly on my knee. I am trembling softly, a nervous energy thrumming throughout my entire body. We feel a connection. Though again, a silent one. One does not need words to understand the mind, for we have created a world out of our minds, like two realms intertwined.

            I cup your fingers in mine. Our eyes meet. Time melts into oblivion, into a chaotic mixture of hope and sadness and love and happiness, all fading together. A beautiful mess. Such is the art that means so much more than that which is intentional. For we were never intentional beings, but those that just are.

            We are all we are, I think to myself as the cottage behind us begins to crumble. The light has diminished into a fullness that envelopes across the landscape, hiding the trees in inky blackness. The sound of the stream stops.

            What is going on? I scream those silent words across the silent world. Something feels wrong, because there is something watching behind the now monstrous wall of shadow, something watching us on a detached porch like a raft atop an endlessly deep ocean. It lurks, a supreme predator that stalks back and forth, forever keeping its gaze upon us just beyond the threshold of the unseen half of our once perfect world.

            I don’t know. She thinks/says.

            Then the hulking shape of a lion, towering in its form, covered in a blanket of darkness like a pitch black robe. King of the dark, I noticed myself thinking, though they were not entirely my own words. For this is the lion’s world as well. And it can do as it pleases. Its face emerges fully into the impossible light, the deep set eyes unblinking, mouth hanging agape showing two rows of massive white teeth. It is detached, somehow, emotionless. A killer, born for one thing, to satisfy its animalistic nature to destroy. The face of death itself.

            How did it get here? We both think/say at the same time for we are essential the same being in this world. I am suddenly and utterly afraid. How did it infiltrate such beauty?

            The beast creeps forward, slowly, silently. A noise is coming from within its fierce jowls, like thunder from a deeply clouded sky. A storm, wretched in nature and in the midst of swallowing everything good that once was.

            You cannot be here! I cry.

            The behemoth stops, sets its massive paws into the grass. I watch as the blades underneath those calloused pads begins to melt into strings of decay, withering into limp masses of sludge.

            I can do as I please, the beast growls. I am the interloper, who feasts on the flesh of whatever I feel hunger pangs for. I am the giver of love and the reaper. I am the harvest of souls.

            You cannot! I scream in vain, for I know what the beast speaks of. And at that moment I feel the delicate fingers of my spirit-love slip away as if she had realized that instead of my skin she was feeling it was the leathery hull of some grotesque instect. Her eyes turned down to the floor of the porch, which had already begun to buckle, the splintered boards coming loose from the nails and bending upward like a series of maliciously twisted faces grinning up at us.

            She rises from the chair that is no longer there. I am not even sure it was ever there, such as the cottage behind us and the trickling stream behind the dark wall. The lion watches patiently. It’s horrible, snarled face, unmoving and emotionless. Its teeth gleaming sharply, holding within its mouth a large, red, swollen tongue that seemed to fill its mouth.

            Then she turns toward me, at the bottom of the steps that have dissolved into a descending stairway of sawdust. She turns towards me and smiles. Her lips, a small line of pink lifted to one side, dimpling that side of her cheek. Her eyes as wide and brilliantly hazel as rings of residually hazy golden crescents. She says in her silent way. Good-bye my love. Perhaps we will meet in life, someday. Where the world is fine and green and the skies are blue, and lions keep their distance.

            At that she jolted past the beastly lion, and into the darkness, which swallowed her body in one large gulp.

            I tried to scream, but again I felt no sound, not even the thought of screaming could surface within me. Then I felt the lion begin to move towards where I stood. I felt it as if it were a gathering storm, accumulating into a mass of diseased clouds, bloated and full of pure hatred.

            You know you created me. For I am God and you are God of Gods here in this place. The thing growled menacingly.

            But know that I can devour you and become God of God. I can become all and consume what I like, forever. For what I am is Endless. For what I am is infinite wrath.

            The beast leaped forward, stretching its body out, a gigantic golden arc shooting across the air, snarling, dripping great rivers of saliva through its furled lips. They gleamed like liquid diadems.

            For a moment there was a stillness. A fear that I would be swallowed up, not in darkness, but into the throat of the beast, engulfed completely. But that is not what happened, for the stillness was a pause in the world. I saw the massive beast suspended in the air, claws extended, jagged teeth like pearl-white knives, inches from my face. But it had stopped, and I felt it trying to speak, yet it could not. It was frozen in a moment that would last forever if I wanted it to. For it said itself, I am God of gods in the worlds of my creation. And he is the interloper, the harvest.

            Without thinking, I reached out my hand and grasped underneath the meaty jowls, feeling the beast’s unthinkably thick muscles that covered most of its throat, which were attached seamlessly into its hulking shoulers and throughout the rest of its body. One solid piece of muscle. I felt for the delicate bone in between the tendons of its jaw-line, and once I found it I grabbed the ball of cartilidge. As I squeezed I felt the pain of the beast, rocketing through my arms and into my body, electrifying every nerve from my fingertips to the bottoms of my feet. But I continued, pressing further, squeezing tighter.

            Then it was as if something snapped, not the part of the lion that I was afflicting, but something within it. There was an audible snap, somewhere at the base of its spine and a faint ghostly line of mist like a tendril of smoke from the tip of a smoldering stick.

            And at once I remembered. The fierceness of the lion faded. It’s mouth closing so that all you could see was the tuft of hair underneath its wiskered nostrils. The eyes of the beast softened. I realized that I had once loved it, and that all it wanted from me was for the pain to end.

            The tendril of mist that had escaped the body of the lion had risen into a single ominous cloud above. A word was written on the thick, matted surface of the cloud, and the word was a word of the past, a word that threatened to defeat everything that had to do with life, and moving forward with it. The word was a sad word, which reeked of sickness and death, a hooded creature whose featureless body as transparent and dark yet altogether present. A void that only wanted to take what it could. It lingered for a moment longer, gazing down at me and the lion, then with an ear piercing and wholly audible shriek, peeled away into the darkness.

            Descending to the ground, the lion whimpered, and I felt sadness for it. Because I did in fact create it in this place, and it was my job to set it free. Pain was gone, as it is a temporary and fleeting thought in the minds of those who love.

(To whom knows the dreams between a dream.)