Galactic Gaps

The dream comes at irregular intervals; details replicated with clockwork precision each time, a fog-shrouded landscape, the horizon a billowing grey wall. The floor is smooth and hard but bitterly cold to the touch. Pressing fingers to it sends shivers up my arm. The cold intensifies into a sharp pain. I break contact. The experience, all too real in a supposed dream.

 A dim light grows fuller and faster with each passing second, shifting and changing to take on a vaguely human shape. The light becomes an impression, a blur, a shape, a figure. A woman garbed in turquoise robes with electric blue skin and enormous peacock wings. She seems familiar. Is she from a story? A painting? No. A statue! From a ruin visited once but lost in a tangle of memories.  

She extends her hand. The moment of nervous excitement and trepidation, yet so familiar, always the temptation to pull back battles excited curiosity. Her grip is gentle but suggests an iron strength, a fondness for lesser creatures holding it in check. She rises into the air, faster and faster. High above the fog, above the clouds, through the star-sewn void. The sensation of flight thrills and terrifies like dark wine, a giddiness burning the throat. She crosses gaps between galaxies, then through the darkness of a star collapsed under its own fires. 

She glides through narrow tunnels, twisting in impossible shapes. Somehow she provides protection against huge gravity waves, but I still feel the full force of their terrible strength. I ache for waking, demanding eyes to open to no avail. We pass through impenetrable darkness and raging heat. A pearlescent spiral shimmers in the distance, a sure, enticing path to a semblance of reason.  

The spiral path leads to a soft steady glow, reminiscent of the gentle light she emerged from. The glow becomes brighter, forcing me to blink. My eyes open, revealing an odd landscape dotted with crooked, almost angled plants and trees. The birds circle in strange geometric formations. Even the grass grows at irregular angles. The odd shapes are reminiscent of letters, but they seem to dance almost hypnotically.

One shape whispers “stone”, but the vision goes beyond the colour, coolness, and sharp contours of the rock face. I see the stone’s violent birth in liquid fires hundreds of miles below. I feel lifetimes of the wind’s breath, gentle at first but slowly stripping away the rock over a punishment of ages, breaking even that strength beyond bones. Stone masons scrape and cut, smashing my granite body. Then rebirth! A new shape beside my brothers. We lie together forming great roads, carrying adventurers to strange and distant lands. I band with my brothers to form high temples, bathed in the songs of humans reaching beyond their fleshy shells into eternity. We fit snugly to form the houses that flow with the laughter, tears and hopes of a hundred lifetimes. 

This glyph reads “sky”, I am nothing enclosing everything. I am blue cheer, melancholy rains, and black rages, my breath screams and even the great stones tremble. A million imaginations paint stories and visions upon the streaks, blurs, and bubbles of my cloud body. 

Another shape catches my eye, then I feel her hand on my shoulder. It is time to leave and return to the waking world. My distant body stirs, dawn’s call closing in. I long to explore just one more cypher. A petulant outburst climbs my throat, but she is right, as always. I miss the warmth of blood and breath, the simple pleasures of food, sun and touch.

To visit this place is to glimpse the roots of the word. The place beyond thought teasing and tormenting poets as they seek the rhythms and music behind words. To live, however, is to taste those glyphs, seeing the sky, touching stones, to add my short life experience to the garden of the eternal imagination.

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