In the misty hours just before the sanguine tip of dawn, a dream creeps to me, silent and deadly on its cat-like paws. Its eyes, yellow and narrow, regard me nonchalantly, with the faintest wisps of humor flitting in their reflection. At this I recoil, for the feline thing is stranger beyond my belief--a feral firefly twinkles in its pupils, fierce and violent by day, quiet and furious by night. Its tail, sleek and shining with the colors of nightmares, is poised royally with underserved pride. Its mouth, sweet in its smallest form, is stretched open to show two marvelous rows of sharply pointed teeth. And, again, in its eyes, a light of its wildness blooms, a flower red as blood, an apple green as envy.
Sanguinolent Dreams
{Navami M.}
And the scene changes—it shifts between the different worlds of the mind, slowly awake, then buried by sleep, then the dream leaves me, a silent exit, then I dive again into the deepened waters of the land of nightmares disguised in the sweet skin of a dream.
From the distantly near future I see, all in a split second, a minute, an hour, reels of undiscovered photographs, the marbled path to heaven, the onyx road to hell. A woman in a wedding dress, flowers crumpled in her angry fist; a boy in a suit resembling those of long ago, his lips trembling with the full grief of a child; a man, drowned in the subtle tears of another’s joy.
It reaches me on its quiet paws, and circles around my legs, slowly, with muted steps, intent on seizing my sleeping soul at any abrupt moment. I am clad in the pants I had sent into the wash hours before--after I had done that, I had duly fallen asleep as the wash of exhaustion engulfed my tired mind. I had dreamt, for the slight, sacred window of a second, a picture of misery, a bird standing apart from its flock, ostracized by its brothers, the rigid dichotomy of color standing between them. The flock, and their blood-patterned wings, crimson, like war; the lone bird, and its marred purity, white like the clouds in the flaming sky, silver against the carmine moon. The stars had sunk into the moon, then the moon into clouds, the clouds into sky, sky into birds, then everything had been nothing and nothing had been the bewitching color of fire.