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.

There’s a monastery here but it’s sideways, its walls made of woven branches that shift when I look away. A monk sits in the corner who is also my mother. She’s not surprised to see me. She says something about early Buddhists but her mouth isn’t moving, the words are coming from the moss, from the green rot smell that fills the clearing. Everything is moss-colored now. Even my skin looks photosynthetic.

I need to leave but I’ve forgotten how. There’s a road but it’s been overgrown with decision-trees—actual trees, branching structures that split and split and split. I’m supposed to choose but my animal brain rejects all paths simultaneously. This is extinction by instinct, I think. This is what it means to freeze when there are too many options, to become immobilized by the sheer architecture of possibility. The trees are laughing. They sound like Seth Meyers but distorted, playing backwards.

Someone is being abducted. Not taken—just drawn upward by a conclusion that hasn’t been reasoned yet, just assumed. It might be me. The sky opens like a mouth and I see formal logic written in the clouds: symbols interlocking, propositional chains hanging like intestines. I understand it perfectly until I try to look directly at it, and then it’s just clouds again, just weather, just the random firing of atmosphere.

There’s fur on my tongue now. I taste myself eating myself. A fox is running through a television set, and on the screen, a woman who used to be my childhood friend is explaining the difference between reasoning and knowledge, but her voice is the sound of water over stones, and I can’t retain any of it. The information dissolves.

The forest floor is breathing beneath me. Roots pulse like veins. I realize the whole thing is a single organism and I’m inside its mind, or it’s inside mine, the boundary has become a membrane that doesn’t hold. Birds are speaking in the etymologies of dead languages—“reason” fragments into “ratio” fragments into “reckon” and they’re all the same word being born over and over. The punk rock history is playing from somewhere deep. A guitar riff made of howling.

I’m running now but I haven’t decided to run. My legs are deciding. My instincts are driving the body and I’m just the passenger consciousness, the witness-thing that thinks it’s in control. This is animal cognition stripped bare. This is what a deer feels when it bolts. This is non-human thinking, the kind that doesn’t need language, that moves through the world like water through water.

There’s a clearing and in it, a book is open on the ground. The pages are breathing. The words rearrange themselves every time I try to read them. Something about special moral categories. Something about humans and animals being the same thing split down a line that was never really there. A monk walks past (the same monk, or a different one, or all monks are one monk) and doesn’t acknowledge me because I’m not here, not really, I’m just a pattern of thinking occurring in the forest itself.

The copper taste returns. My jaw is moving again. I’m eating something that tastes like understanding but I don’t know what. The forest is feeding me or I am the forest feeding. The difference collapses.

Something is about to be revealed. The trees are gathering closer. Their branches form symbols I almost recognize—logic gates, maybe, or animal tracks, or the branching structure of thought itself splitting into two and two and two until—