Begin at the Beginning

The homescreen, through narrowly slitted eyes, reads 3:23 am. Waking arrives not with a jolt or a start, but like an urgent wave surging toward the beach, bobbing toward consciousness yet with fingers clutched urgently to the story trailing just behind in the dream.

“A girl and a boy in a great grey world, seeing, engaging, immersed in the beauty and richness and actual magic of being in the world…”

I fumble for my phone, trying only to open my eyes that least little bit, enough to see (but not banish) the thoughts that spark from inside them (my eyes). Thumbs typing without order or logic, channeling the stream, then close the screen and drift back, down, up, to return to the space of the dream.

But, as always happens, the dream hovers, just beyond reach, laughing. So I lie, in the dark, and flirt with it, dance with it, beg for it to come back.

It does not listen.

Instead it teases, telling and retelling and telling again, the mostly forgotten but still lingering threads of the story, the line of the narrative morphing and waving as the visceral sensations of the dream coalesce into a paler, waking translation, structured - a beginning a middle and a resolution - with words and punctuation.

At a certain point it can wait no longer. Desperate to exorcise this creature and at least return to sleep (the embrace of the dream itself no longer an option), I submit, turn on the light and fumble for pencil and paper. The story emerges full-grown, one spasmodic jolt of fevered scribbles, one dense page of single spaced scrawl, mistakes abandoned in place, stopping only at the end. Then, finally, with the last shreds of sense memory curling and flittering at the margins of the page, I turn out the light, roll over and sleep.