(Do dreams commit suicide by allowing us to wake, or do we murder dreams by waking)
I hear far away, an ominous, unknown, booming, threatening what? I don’t know. Night drags on. Morning rain mists the dawn with reluctant rain that doesn’t intend to stop or increase. The gentle rain mingles with brutish thunder in an aural tapestry — oddly not threatening nor urgent, only persistent — and cold.
I shiver.
The booming stops. The rain doesn’t. The rain is determined now with steady, drumming. Days, and days, and days, of rain — endless days of rain.
The stream has become everywhere under the trees.
Small fish splash between the trunks of black trees and endless water.
The Sun, no longer far away, but here, everywhere, throws spears of light through the leaves; anticipating Cathedral beams before there were Cathedrals. The splashing fish make tiny rainbows in the wet blackness below.
The blackness erupts — scales, teeth, something furry, squirting red. Then silence. The redness spreads across the blackness — then nothing, until — A screaming crash of anthropomorphic savages run savagely this way.
I watch them screech by from the safety of above, destroying all in their path. Sometimes they kill each other in their insane frenzy.
I shudder. Soon I forget. I move to higher branches.
All ‘round me the sweetness of ripe juice-fruit calls to my hunger. I eat my fill, then turn to drink from the pool of water collected in a hollow of branches. I climb higher. From high up, I see an ocean of tree-tops dancing with the wind.
Higher yet, leatherwing soars, searching opportunity, but leatherwing dares not risk wings tangled in branches. I have no fear. Far away, smoke and fire rise in thumping booms and flashing light. Another day.
Roars and screams everywhere, sing contemptiously with the whispering leaves; terrible and beautiful by turn; an argument in strange agreement, like Hell & Heaven before they went their separate ways. If I ask how long it has no meaning
An alluring smell, overwhelming, intoxicating, fills the air. A hand from beyond shakes my shoulder — “Wake up sleepyhead, coffee’s ready, time to get going.
Was it only a dream?
It seemed so real.