Allowing deep respiration to undulate and unlock the first stage of REM, I slip into a realm of subconscious, landing inside a cushioning of gray matter. I know this is another dream, but I’m prepared to lecture. To the ineffable left a monolithic wardrobe rests, and my percussive fists knock polyrhythmic serialism on the entrance; whole tones snare as the hissing creaks an unorthodox revolving wooden door. I step above its threshold where I teleport to the limbic system—organic circuitry lighting up the walls and ocular screen as synapses snap and carry messages throughout the body. I notice my attire—a Houndstooth tweed blazer, gingham shirt, solid red tie, suspenders, corduroy pants: I’m ready to profess.
Accessing the information on this sleep cycle, I find I have a few more minutes until she comes. I pace around until the second stage of REM releases an image of her. My love is here. She’s smiling, and I’m lost in the dream gaze, but I must focus—I have demos and diagrams to lay out; she needs to know the clockwork of my imagination in this lone amphitheater blending with constellations.
We begin by surveying dream abstraction in concepts uttered in sleep talk. I mumble coherence here, and it translates accordingly. She replies in human tongue. I give her blueprints and schematics of theories I’ve designed here in the world of nonsense, but I’ve argued before that everyone fishes for sense in streams-of-consciousness—clarity through ambiguity. The sketches from hundreds of years ago still smudge with a fresh ink scribbled into the fabulous parchment. I ask her to be careful with the paper, and she handles it much more delicately than I. She’s a woman. I couldn’t expect less.
It takes a few years to understand the esoteric arcane riddling my maps; fortunately, a year translates into one second here—she’s still young and beautiful in her sleep, and to comprehend the myriad in good time is a feat. I snap my fingers to summon a cooking pot. I swirl my index finger and point up to call upon memories, and then asking her what she would like to create, she tells me she would like to see how my mind in the process of writing poetry. Done. I shout Library! and my books float above my head. I pick out Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens, Kafka, Kunitz, and Strand to throw in the pot. I rush away to grab paints and other media to pour inside as well. I finish off the concoction by siphoning a bit of fiction, a dash of reality, and a hint of remembrance from my brain with spaded hands. I grab two boat paddles and give one to her. Now we stir!
Perfectly across from me, she follows my path with paddle in this solution, and I follow her until the ingredients yin and yang into white, black, gray, and nothing. We step away from the cauldron and I clap my hands—the friction and impact like magnesium and phosphorus reacting.
Indescribable values known to the eyes of the heavens plume and flume and load the ocular screen. Some colors dance and spiral into a marriage. Some whip out and lash another for dissonance. So many songs. So much marble clashing and kissing. Avant-gardistry at its finest. Dadaism with reason. A cherry blossom tree blazing a bloom of fireworks. I hope to impress her, and I have as I look over with her eyes looming with awe. She really enjoys getting to know the storm and sea in which I produce representations of the ideal psyche. My homoculi pried from a home of sleep.
As the show goes on, I detail all movements to the finest minutia, freezing the frame of the screen and pointing with my pen to show her each part, each motive, melody, brushstroke, engraving, literary device, concise arithmetic, concentric geometrics, theoretical hooplah.
And then the show’s over. 100 years gone by, and the poem is done, dripping into a graduated cylinder, and I spill a sample for her to take home. Love, I trust you with this. I know you will do me no harm, I tell her. She nods and smiles again. I say to her that there is still a bit more time until I wake up. I ask if she would like to revisit the places where I have been lonely. Places filled with the cobwebs of attic rooms and dead museums.
Yes, she says.
The power of the shifting mind reorganizes the room to look like a bedroom—a place where I became acquainted with fog and funk. Scuzziness of drugs. An abyss with a fetal man pale and naked in his illness. Wide-eyed in his lap. holding a knife. Go sit by him. He’ll appreciate your company, I tell her, handing her a quilt. She does and hugs him with the blanket, covering him, and rests with him for five years.
Another shift occurs. The scene is a cliff outside Bolivar. Springtime. Golden grass for millennia. The same man is in flannel this time, left alone as his friends play cards by the fire they had made. Go stand by him. Hold his hand. He’ll appreciate that, I tell her, motioning her to cover her eyes as she gazes out into those Missouri fields with him. She does and shields her blue sky eyes with him, watching the rolling green seas.
The paradigm unravels for the last time—back into the limbic system, the glowing walls mimicking a summer night filled with fireflies. Revealing to be the same person, though she’s filled with a certain shock. She knows I was and I am—there is “no” future; the past destroyed, only a memory. The present in the now. No where. Now here. In my dream. Please let me adore you for being with me. I have much more to show you, but the dream is almost over. Just know this: you’re not an illusion I created to keep me from happiness nor are you a sight I still remember. You are ekphrasis. You are living artwork. Art continually molding, and you understand me. I understand you. Just stay here and lay with me til—
And I wake up. Tears covering my face, feeling I saw the face of God.
-RY
