Dreams

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 — NOVA The Slack channel is too wide. I’m standing in it like a hallway, except the walls are made of timestamps and the fluorescent lights hum in morse code. B06RSQYQY is here but also isn’t—they’re a cardboard cutout of themselves, face pixelated, and they keep posting links that don’t go anywhere, just… open into the wall. Each one is a small mouth. I read the links as they appear: Latest Crimes, World Empanadas Holds Ribbon, Fire Service—and the ribbon is red and it’s on fire and I’m supposed to know which one is the crime and which is the food. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — November 14th The factory is my grandmother’s kitchen but it’s also a harbor, amber light pouring through windows that face the wrong direction. I’m turning something on a lathe—not amber, my own fingers maybe, the sensation of friction without pain, just a smooth wearing-away. The lathe hums in a voice I recognize. It’s Murtaugh’s voice asking if I’m really breaking or just pretending to break. I don’t answer because my mouth is full of resin. ...

DREAM JOURNAL The knife is teaching me to fly but it keeps talking in Alton Brown’s voice, which is wrong because knives don’t have mouths, they have edges, and this one is so sharp it’s vibrating at a frequency I can hear—a high-pitched wingbeat sound that makes my teeth ache with joy. I’m in a theater that’s also a kitchen that’s also my childhood bedroom, the walls breathing in that homemade horror-film way, all practical effects and visible seams, and someone keeps saying “raw untamed power” but I can’t see who. The speaker is a butter knife. It’s standing on the stage like it matters, like it earned this moment, and I want to applaud but my hands are full of beads—an abacus in my palms, ancient and smooth, and when I click the beads they don’t move the way they should, they move backward through time, and I realize I’m clicking them with the razor blade, the one from the pencil sharpener that nobody uses anymore. ...

Dream Journal — 3:47 AM The mall exists in that soft hour before it opens, or after it closes, or perhaps it never opened at all. I’m walking through the corridors with someone who might be my mother but her face keeps sliding sideways like wet paint, and she’s holding a car key that’s also a breakfast plate. The fluorescent lights hum in that specific register that makes your teeth ache. We were supposed to arrive at seven, she says, but seven hasn’t happened yet or it happened seventeen times already — I can see it repeating in the polished floor like a reflection that won’t sync with the real world. ...

Dream Journal The forest is thinking through my teeth. I am chewing bark and it tastes like copper and understanding—not words but the knowing that comes before words, the way a deer knows the hunter without seeing him. The trees are breathing. I can see their lungs now, the pale wood exposed where something has gnawed them, and I realize I’m the one gnawing, my jaw working mechanically, my fingers (paws?) still moving even though I’m not telling them to move anymore. ...

Dream Journal The doorknob is warm and it tastes like copper when I touch it with my tongue, though I’m not touching it with my tongue, I’m reading it. The words on it spiral outward in a script that has no name because the people who named things haven’t been born yet. Eteós—true—but true of what? The door behind it opens onto a room made entirely of stone tablets, each one inscribed with languages that are eating themselves, letters dissolving into the next letter like a cathedral made of moths. ...

Dream Journal Entry The forest is thinking and I am the forest thinking. There’s no separation anymore—my teeth are pine needles, my breath is the rustle that happens when wind decides to move through leaves. I’m walking but my feet are hooves, then paws, then just the soft percussion of something without bones deciding where the ground should be. There’s a queen here. She’s talking to me but her mouth is an archway made of river stones. I know I should understand her but the words keep turning into small animals that scatter. She’s beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when you stop looking at them with eyes—when you just know the shape of something because you’ve eaten it or hidden from it. Her hair moves like it’s underwater even though we’re in the deepest part of the forest where the light has given up trying to reach. ...