Dream #1: Half-Dusk (in the tradition of Soseki's "Ten Nights of Dreams")

Dear friend,

I live in a dark cabin. Centipedes, ants, and other critters lurk behind doorways.  I can hear them clickety-clacking around me. Sand surrounds my cabin. The foam of ocean waves hits the shore not too far away. And all around, half-darkness coats everything.

By the cabin stands a lighthouse. It does good job of rotating, but I have never seen a sailor moor his boat here. I have come to think the lighthouse is useless.

Only one window in my cabin frames the post-dusk sky. Every now and then the black silhouette of a seagull will form a check-marked blot on the landscape.

I used to think the blue post-dusk sky would comfort me. But when I arrived, something in the air stopped. The engines of the cosmos ceased running. The sky’s heavy slog towards the night froze. And now, Time’s pendulum hangs still. The sky is the color that comes just before the sunrise, dark enough to mistake the shadow of the tree for a monster, but not dark enough to make the island seem like an empty hole of nothing. It is a blue half-darkness. Everything is stuck here, except the animals and the lighthouse. And me? I write.

Every twelve seconds a light flashes up my house, drowning the cabin in a white flare. It wakes me up from dreams. Sometimes I think it is the white flame of an explosion. Let me explain.

In the dream we are in a green park, and I can see the sunlight. You are looking at the sun. You notice something suspicious about it. Isn’t it too white today? you say. I am lying on the grass, and though I think I am just reclining, when you turn to look at me, you see my feet are buried underground, as if the grass has swallowed me. I look down and see green tendrils crawling up my torso. How long have I been half-buried like this? I ask myself. Why did I not notice? Why did you not notice, friend? My face is tense. I begin to shout. It is not your fault that I am being eaten.

Your mouth opens as if to say something, but then the sun explodes, and a wave of white fire reaches out to hug us. And your instinct is to reach down to my arms, grab my hands, pull me. Before the white fire consumes us, your hands grip mine.

I wake up to see the light of the lighthouse lighting me up. The light spends many seconds away from my house—twelve of darkness for every burst of light. But that one feels like an explosion every time, especially when I am sleeping.

Can you hear that explosion of light in my voice? Is my voice shaking with the nervousness of the bugs in my room? Is it foaming with the waves? Most of all, friend, can you recognize this voice through my writing, so long enveloped in my island’s darkness? Do I show up in your dreams, trying to save you, trying to love you?

I have yet to give this place a name. Does it deserve one, friend? What do you think it should be called? I would love to sit with you and discuss this, if you still think we can still do that sort of thing. I know I ran away. Did my disappearance ease your anguish? Did my ghost linger? Yours did in me.

When I walk along the beach, I will feel a soft breath behind my back. Something is about to tell me a secret, I think. I look back and the wind blows its voice at me. Its voice does not have a language. It is palpable, it has identity, but I cannot talk to it like we used to talk in half-nights as half-dark as mine.

Can you still hear me? Are you still there? Have you run away yet?

I was talking about the wind. The wind does not have a voice but it carries the voices of other things. I can hear, for example, whale songs from my house sometimes. They offer a dim kind of company, only the knowledge that living things too populate the seas. I cannot give myself the illusion that they sing for me.

The whales ultimately offer me as much company as the stars. They lead parallel lives, the stars and the whales. Whales and stars both offer spectacles, effortlessly. But the whales and the stars will never meet. So many sublime things that will never ever meet. The whales will never sing with the stars and the stars will always explode alone.

But you and I, friend, we met, and you can only meet once. We met once and your face is a ghost to me now, as surely as my voice must be a ghost to you. I am hoping that when you hear this, you will see my face. Maybe then I’ll be able to see yours. Even in dreams your face is covered in shadows.

We met, friend. We met and our bodies were once as immediate to each other as the foot is to the ground. Friend, if you don’t remember anything, tell me at least that you remember the aftertaste of that immediacy, that it lingers, that it haunts you, that it comforts you.

I know now that I live in the dark. But were I to spend too much time in a place of light, without any kind of reminder of the dark, I would come to forget what darkness felt like, its hollow black glow. Do you know what surrounded us, friend? Do you know what songs we sang? Do you know what children played in the parks where we used to stroll? Do you remember anything about where we lived beside its name? Can you infuse that name with a history, with buildings, with dates and rain and clouds and games?

I can’t. I do not even remember the name. 

I do not know your shape. I do not know your gender. I do not know if I kissed you or hugged you. I do not remember anything. I only know with surefooted certainty that we were once friends. I know you are not a fiction. You are not a fiction.

Maybe it’s the post-dusk. Or maybe it’s the disembodied voices: is the skittering really of bugs? Or are they just pellets falling from the roof? Are the waves really foamy, or is it just a crunching inside my brain? Do whales really sing or is it just the wind howling? Are the shadows of trees outside my house really monsters?