First Light

We leave at first light, on quickened wing, fading around the edges, slipping away, dissolving, lest the sleeper should catch us. Rushing out of sight, we are washed back into the sea. Sometimes in those moments of half waking they reach out a hand, grasping to keep hold of us, but like ink on water, we disperse, the clenching fist closing around nothingness.

They want us to stay, just a little more, just the next glimpse. They struggle to remember what was being shown to them only moments before. Sometimes they succeed in remembering, sometimes only snippets. Occasionally one of them drifts back into sleep and we come out again from the corners of their mind, from behind the black stage curtains, from under the bed, from under the waves of the subconscious. Seeping back through, like an image emerging on a piece of blank photographic paper.

We are as ghosts it seems. We don’t stay once the eyelids start to flicker open. Luckily we have wings to speed us on our way, dark transparent wings that are almost invisible in the twilight. And we can fly, but unlike other creatures with wings that soar up into the light, into the bright sky, we fly deep, down and down. Each silent flap of wing taking us deeper into the dark. Down into the murky ocean of stored memories and incoherent thoughts.

We scoop up the pieces of dismembered and unremembered flotsam. We weave them into a cobweb of dreams and carry the silvery blanket into the room silently while you slumber. Laying it over you, softly, so you don’t even notice it descending upon you. Well, maybe a slight shifting of position, a sigh maybe, or the subtlest change to your intake of breath might indicate there is some awareness of the weight of the gossamer web as it touches the skin. Some dreamers seem to either slightly resist or embrace the faint feeling of falling, dissolving, as the shimmery threads melt just a little as dreamer and dream become one. No difference, just the dream now. We are at once both silent witnesses and sharers of the dream also.

But when daylight comes we retreat swiftly taking our webs with us. They do leave a trace though, a feeling, an impression. Sometimes it is panic, heart racing, grief. Sometimes it leaves a coating of contentment, joy, memories of sunny days in bright fields. Sometimes it leaves your body aroused, as if awaiting your lover’s next tender kiss on your stomach, butterflies, sleepy pleasure.

On occasion the afterglow, the imprint of the dream can stay for hours, all day even. But more often than not it’s leaving is instantaneous, whisked away on the tail of our flight.

Sleep well..........