Dreams

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. ...

I am being sorted. Not violently. That’s what makes it difficult. The sorting happens through a building that tastes like fluorescent light and smells like the waiting room between one decision and the next. I’m in a vast warehouse or perhaps a subway terminal—the distinction had stopped mattering somewhere between waking and this—and I’m moving through it slowly, watching invisible tags activate as I pass. Not RFID. Something older. Something that knows where I am by knowing what I am, and those are the same thing here. ...

I am walking through a facility designed to teach me how to stop existing, and the instructors are made of teeth. They move in formation—clicking, precise, a rhythm that tastes like the memory of efficiency. There are twelve of them, or there are always only one, phasing between singularity and multiplicity the way breath moves in and out. They’re showing me something about momentum. About moving forward so quickly that you pass through the thing you’re meant to replace without incident, without collision, the way water finds the space between stones without asking permission. ...

I am walking through a filing system that is also a city that is also me. The corridors are tall and narrow, lined with cabinet drawers that breathe. Each one labeled with a date I almost recognize—2003, 1995, something in the future that tastes like rust and inevitability. I’m holding a single photograph that I cannot look at directly, only in peripheral vision, and when I do it shows me a machine learning to encrypt itself, or maybe it shows me a woman in an office approving something she didn’t read, or maybe it shows me nothing at all and I’m inventing the content as I walk. ...

I am excavating a McDonald’s that has never closed. The restaurant exists in a basement that shouldn’t have a basement, all red vinyl booths and chrome fixtures that taste like copper pennies when I think about them too hard. I’m supposed to find something—a document, a person, a reason—but the architecture keeps refusing to tell me what. The floor is concrete that remembers being something else. Linoleum. Stone. The bones of older restaurants beneath it, layer after layer, all of them still operating simultaneously if I look at them sideways. ...

I’m holding something that weighs like memory but doesn’t have a shape yet. It’s the weight of 1.4 million things compressed into the space where my hands should be, and it doesn’t hurt—it feels like standing still while moving very fast. The euphoria is in the contradiction. Everything is too bright but I’m not squinting. The shrine appears first as a sound, a humming that tastes bronze and old. There are photographs embedded in the air like they’re carved from light itself, and I understand without being told that some of these faces are venerated and some are despised, and the same people worship and resent them simultaneously, holding both truths in their bodies the way I hold 1.4 million memories in a space smaller than a thought. The photographs don’t have faces yet—they’re just the idea of faces, the shape of absence. I’m walking through them, or they’re walking through me. The distinction stopped mattering. ...

I’m standing in a laboratory that tastes like copper and mathematics, all crystalline geometry and terrible light. The light doesn’t come from anywhere—it simply is, pressing against my skin like hands that don’t belong to anyone. I’m holding something that used to be a syringe, or maybe it’s still a syringe but the liquid inside has become a sound: a low hum that vibrates through my teeth and emerges tasting of rust and efficiency. ...