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.

I tell her something about reason but my voice comes out as the sound of branches breaking under weight that doesn’t exist yet. She nods. Of course she nods. We both know that thinking is just another kind of instinct, that logic is only the pattern deer recognize before they run. The queen reaches toward me and her hand is a paw is a hand is the root system of something that’s been growing since before thinking started.

The garage appears now—I don’t know how, it’s just there between the trees, and the trees don’t mind. There are switches everywhere, hanging from branches, embedded in bark, and I know I’m supposed to move them in a specific order but the order keeps changing based on how hungry I am. A man is there adjusting something but he’s also the queen also my own reflection in water that isn’t water but the space between thoughts. He says the speed test matters. Speed matters. Everything matters only in the moment before you decide it doesn’t.

I can taste copper and green things. My tongue is too large for my mouth, or my mouth is too small, or mouths aren’t real and this is just what sensation looks like when it forgets to be organized. The forest is breathing and I realize I’ve been breathing wrong my whole life—not inhaling and exhaling but being breathed, held in the lungs of something that thinks in rings and seasons and the slow calculus of root and rot.

A page floats past. It has words on it but they’re written in the spacing between words, in the gaps where meaning used to live. The Funny Pages. I’m supposed to laugh but laughter is predatory here, it’s the sound of something successful, and my body doesn’t know how to make that sound without it being a shriek. Without it being a warning.

The queen is gone now or she was never here or I’m looking at her wrong—she’s the forest floor itself, the soft decomposition where nothing dies because nothing ever stops being part of the thinking. I know this the way animals know things: not through reason but through the extinction of doubt, the way instinct bypasses the question entirely and just does.

Time collapses sideways. I’m in the garage and in the forest and in the space between breathing where all the switches are finally in the right position. The land speed test is happening but it’s not cars moving, it’s the forest accelerating, the entire breathing system of green thinking speeding up until the trees blur into a single green impulse, a unified will that has no need for architecture because it is architecture, structural principle made flesh and chlorophyll.

My hands are on the switches. My hands are hooves. My hands are nothing that can hold anything but I’m holding the speed anyway, I’m holding the acceleration, I’m holding the moment just before the forest understands that it has always been moving at this velocity and there’s no such thing as standing still only varying degrees of the same forward motion and—

The queen’s voice returns but it’s underneath everything now, resonating from the soil, and she’s explaining something about logic being just another animal’s way of surviving but I can’t focus because I’m too busy being the breathing too busy being the thinking too busy being the forest noticing it has teeth and they’re sharp and they’re mine and they’re not mine and the speed keeps increasing