God of Dreams

A milk-pale rain fell from a blurred black sky. It tingled softly on my exposed arms. Behind me stood a lake of shimmer. My birthplace, perhaps. I could not remember how I’d gotten here.

I walked, not looking at the path my feet trod. Instead, I stared into the sky, which gradually cleared until I could see a myriad of stars, an entire alien milky way in the shape of a blunt-winged moth. In the aftermath of the rain, peacefulness steamed like humidity on my skin.

I came to an arch so old that plants grew from the soil accumulated in the cracks of the stone. I passed beneath it into an abandoned field grown wild. “I am disembodied,” I said. “I am dreaming.” And I knew what that meant; the rules of normal physics no longer applied to me.

Flight is a blessing for lucid dreamers. I lifted my arms—and though sometimes in such dreams I struggle to get off the ground—there was no struggle tonight. I soared with ease into the air, let myself spin slowly with my arms out and my fingers scratching trails of light from the darkness.

A forest of new growth surrounded me. I ducked and wove through the trees, dodging black branches that grasped for me. My laughter bubbled as I came out above the woods and saw the moon grown full and bright and red as a molten coin. Beneath the moon flitted dozens of dragonflies with white and black bodies and spiderweb wings. I joined them, and they were not afraid.

Now, Luna magnetized my gaze again. I spoke to myself: “I don’t have time to fly to the moon.” But something inside me wondered if I did. I reached my hands, prepared myself for the leap to space.

Flight faltered; I fell. I grabbed for a tree limb but it broke beneath my weight and I plummeted down, away from the light and toward the deep, still, forever night below. And yet, I smiled. For this was a dream and nothing could harm me.

Or so I thought until I landed: and flesh gave way, and bones shattered, and punctured lungs spasmed as blood painted an abstract scream across the darkness. And so I lay, while dragonflies came to hover, while they fitted their bodies together and became a deity with a thousand eyes and a thousand wings and limbs as numerous as the skulls of the dead.

With a tongue long and coiled black as a snake, the dragonfly god whispered in my bleeding ears: “I am the architect of dreams. And in time, all who sleep become my prey.”

∼ Charles Gramlich

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