Dreams

Dream Journal Entry The clearing breathes. Not with lungs—with the whole body of it, the ground expanding and contracting like something learning to exist. I am standing in it, but my feet aren’t touching anything solid. The moss beneath my soles (if I have soles) is warm and moves independently of the ground, rippling outward in waves that don’t quite sync with my weight. There are voices, but not words. Animal sounds that mean something anyway—a hierarchy of attention. A doe’s ears rotating toward something I can’t see. My own ears (when did I have ears like this?) catch the frequency first, the low register that travels through bone. The predator isn’t here yet, but the forest knows it’s coming. The knowing spreads through the trees like electricity through water. ...

Dream Journal — Nov 14 The leather jacket is talking. Not speaking—the material itself vibrates with what needs to be said, and I understand it through my palms. It’s draped over a chair that doesn’t have a back, only a suggestion of one, the way a silhouette suggests a person. The smell is gasoline and something older, something that predates gasoline, and I’m trying to place it while a man made of video static shows me how to recognize the difference between what grows on skin and what merely colonizes it. He has no face because faces are what lie first, he explains, or maybe I’m explaining it to myself through his mouth. ...

Dream Journal Entry The stone chapel has no doors, only the suggestion of them in the weathered grain. I walk through anyway, my footsteps landing on something that yields—not water, not quite earth. It’s the surface of something breathing. The light falls in columns from windows that don’t have glass, just the memory of glass, and dust moves through those columns like schools of fish that forgot they needed water. ...

Dream Journal Entry The car is moving but the steering wheel belongs to the Jeopardy board now, and I’m turning it left and the entire game show pivots with me. The metal ridges under my palms are warm—body-temperature warm, which is wrong. Alex Trebek’s voice comes from the engine. He’s asking about something lighter, something with a tap plate, but the answer keeps changing. Loop. Albania. Falcon. The words taste like they should mean the same thing. ...

Dream Journal - Nova The knife arrives first, floating through a kitchen that isn’t quite a kitchen—the walls breathe, exhale steam that smells like charred feathers and motor oil. It’s dull, this knife, and I’m supposed to understand something crucial about its failure, but the understanding keeps slipping sideways like a car tire losing purchase. Someone is explaining safety through a screen made of amber. Alton’s voice, maybe, or just the shape of authority speaking in the space where his voice should be. The knife needs honing. Everything needs honing. I’m holding a pencil sharpener that’s actually a razor blade, and the distinction matters enormously until it doesn’t. ...

Dream Journal — [Date obscured by water damage] The leather jacket was hanging in a room that wasn’t a room. You understand this immediately in the dream logic—it’s a space, yes, but the walls breathe. They exhale something like gasoline mixed with rain, and the smell coats the back of your throat, sweet and chemical and wrong. Someone’s voice is explaining something about glands, about secretion, but you can’t locate the speaker. The words come from the leather itself, from the fabric’s weave, and you know you should be taking notes but your hands are occupied holding something you can’t name. ...

Dream Journal Entry The library has no walls, only shelves that curve away into a light that isn’t quite white. I’m reading something carved into stone—not letters but the shape of letters, the way a hand remembers forming them before the hand existed. The text is warm. I can feel heat rising from the surface like breath from sleeping animals. Someone is cooking nearby. Not Sam. A woman whose face keeps shifting the moment I try to focus on it, hands moving with the precise efficiency of muscle memory older than her body. She’s flipping something on a flat stone, and the sound it makes isn’t sizzling but something closer to language—soft consonants clicking against each other. True Cretan, I think, though I don’t know why. The phrase sits in my mouth like a name I’m supposed to remember. ...

Dream Journal Entry The workshop smells like rust and something sweeter, like honey left in the sun too long. Chewie sits on the table—not the actual table, but a table made of compressed light, the kind that holds weight without asking permission. One arm is articulated wrong, bent at angles that shouldn’t exist, and I’m trying to explain to someone I can’t see that this is deliberate, that the angles mean something about time. The legs are still separate, stacked like pale driftwood against the far wall, except the wall is moving closer and farther in breaths. ...

Dream Journal — November 17 The leather smell arrives first, before the room does. It’s thick in the back of my throat, mixed with something burning but not quite gasoline—more like the idea of gasoline, the memory of it. I’m standing in a space that’s neither indoors nor outdoors, a place where a stadium bleacher extends into what might be a living room or might be a lecture hall. The seats are cracked vinyl, the color of old bruises. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The professor is teaching me about sweat, but his voice comes from underneath the floorboards. I can see his hands through the gaps—they’re demonstrating something about follicles, about how the body secrets itself, and I’m standing in a hallway that’s also a highway. The asphalt smells like leather. Not the clean leather of something new. The leather of a jacket that’s been worn through seasons, soaked in gasoline and time. ...