Dream I, Antarctica Once I dreamt of isolation: of being completely alone in a void of white. I floated in and out of existence in this bottomless, directionless world with no voice or self to comfort me. So I let myself drift apart... the Other became a voice, whispering so low I could not hear. I strained to hear the voice, and in listening I created a chorus of men and women. Their tongue was foreign, and it took an eternity to bend the language to my thought.

They said: "Γίνε καλύτερος άνθρωπος από τον πατέρα σου" and I obeyed.

 

Dream II, Aiden

Once I dreamt of the wastes, spread out indefinitely like some forgotten sandbox of the old gods--nuclear gods of fire and power and destruction. The myriad creatures had banded together in their petty tribes, and those from the numbered mechanical caves had yet to emerge, reborn, from their trials… or fail in the trying. But one man claimed the wastes and the tribes and the humans underground and walked in the sunless day as the radiation burned his flesh from his bones. He walked without footprint and lived without breath. He commanded some to live and others to die, and they obeyed only fearing his displeasure. Aiden stayed as long as he pleased but eventually his playthings bored him, and he left us to rot in the cesspool of our wanton sins.

 

Dream III, Warm Sun

Once I dreamt of a grass-laden knoll, bathed in the crisp, Warm Sun of a perfect summer day. You, my darling, were there with me, laid just under the shade of the tree crowing the hill. The boundless sky was sapphire blue, and I picked a purple orchid and tucked it behind your left ear. We talked and sung and read throughout this endless day; your fingers twined loosely through mine. The mountains--like sentinels--kept the frantic world at bay miles away wherever we looked. How I long to see you again, my lost green-eyed lover...

 

Dream IV, Cranberry Chocolate Sundae!

Once I dreamt of the Bizarre Jelly 5 Otaku, his tiger-striped jacket and his beam katana. He came to me enraged, black and white. He shouted: "Cranberry...! Chocolate...! SUNDAE!" and turned into the tiger. Those yellow eyes blazed like the cosmonaut's helmet reflecting sunbeams. The tiger leaped over my head and wrestled on the cliffs with a dragon, fighting the unholy fight of vengeance for fallen friend. Man again, he won the bloody bout and counted his pile of severed heads. It was never enough for this cocky desperado, so he ventured back to his Saint Destroy to exact more meaningless revenge. I was observer, but pity and shame were all I saw.

 

Dream V, Snowstorm

Once I dreamt of a palace draped in white, ruined by the neglect of a thousand aeons heedlessly passing by. The once-great pylons of smooth-hewn stone lay fractured on the marble floors under a frigid carpet of permafrost snow. Icicles grew in sheets over the windows, muting and distorting the stained glass that once told the stories of our heroes, gods and deepest fears. And as I looked to see the sunlight refracted in myriad brittle rainbows, the first tiny flakes of snow whirled from dead-grey storm tendrils clawing over the glacial blue sky. I heard the lonely voice of the wind rip through the tatters of the drapes and as the wall of cold engulfs everything, I remember the silence of the Snowstorm.

 

Dream VI, Ghost

Once I woke up. In the brief lucid moment after sleep but before the drudgery of the world numbs my mind in the way that makes all days blur in a stream of soft-focus memory, the pain scores tiny red lines through my heart like so many glass splinters. I remember what it was like to hold her, to kiss her, to tell her she meant everything to me. I see my lover once again--

But she is gone.

And slowly I succumb--like being drugged--to the banality of my existence, letting consciousness slip out of reach so I don't have to feel the place where her head once laid.