Perchance to Dream

 Dreams

Dreams and dreams and dreams, last night.

~~~~~

First was a concert.  Spiral Rhythm as we are now, on a high stage, thousands in the audience.  Last song, a round, we each take a section and urge the people to sing with us as we move the song in circles.  It’s a new song made up of old songs.  Thousands singing with us.  Glorious.  We are connected, we are powerful, we are one.  The crowd roars.  Tomorrow looms, dark and threatening, but tonight we sing.

I wake and say thank-you for that dream.

~~~~~

Second dream, battle.  Scenery, animals, and people drawn from fantasy and sci-fi worlds. Violent, bloody.  Lies, betrayal, we refuse to give up.  Some of the enemy discover they’ve been lied to and stand with us.  Not many, but it turns the tide.  We don’t win so much as survive, but it is enough.

I wake and lay a curse, whisper it out my window three times for the wind to bear to its target.  I am a Witch.  It isn’t all sweetness and light.  Sometimes a curse is called called for.

~~~~~

Third dream.  Same sorts of people and creatures as before.  First part in a medical facility, overrun with wounded, doing battle of a different sort.  Fighting blood, fighting infection, fighting scarcity.  Ours or theirs, it does not matter - we empty ourselves into them.  Standing between patients and Death.  Exhausted, empty, ever vigilant.  Not today, beloved, this one is mine, you shall not collect them.  He will take no one unless he first takes me.  I tell him where our enemies lie dead, go there and do your sacred task.  

Second part, a feast of remembering.  Tables in rows upon rows.  Crowded.  No one is unmarked - we are all scarred, exhausted, knowing it isn’t over, it’s never over, we have paid and will continue to pay freedom’s price.  We don’t want to be here when tyranny prowls outside the gates, but here we are.  It will help those who could not or would not fight feel better to fete the battle worn.  They cannot begin to understand what we have known.  Easier to let them have their way than to explain.  

We speak quietly to each other.  Where were you?  I was there, and there.  Did you see this person, did you know that one.  Family, friend, tribe-in-arms.  Where did they fall.  Did they make a good end?  We do not weep.  Stone faced, dry-eyed, we listen.  We bore witness and now we tell.  Who is remembered, lives.  We will not stop speaking our memories until even the unclaimed are shared, remembered, carried by all.

At the end, we stand beside a massive memorial for the animals that served as soldiers.  Dogs.  Cats.  Creatures I cannot begin to describe.  They were intelligent.  They spoke.  They knew, as we did, the cost, and they paid willingly.  It is an enormous play structure where other animals may frolic, built to stand for millennia, shining metal, looking like a cat tree mated with a skyscraper and bore this progeny.  The names of the animals cover the walls and columns.  We find the names we know, and in silence we remember, and now our tears course freely.

I wake weeping.  

~~~~~

After the third dream, I did not go back to sleep.  Instead, I watched the darkness until the sun came up and gave shape back to the waking world.  No mystery where these dreams came from, only a painful, helpless-feeling, useless-feeling sorrow and a simmering combination of rage and resentment.

Threefold.  Threefold.  Threefold.