Chapter Text
Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Prologue
Dreams are the world as our brains perceive it. Nonsensical moments in time strung together haphazardly into a tale no mere mortal could possibly untangle themselves. What is remembered of dreams? The important moments? The emotional outbursts? The meaningless meanderings between destinations?
Dreams are a means of teleportation, of learning, of seeking out that which we will never manage to hold. They are a retelling of memories. They are a reinstitution of old truths in the face of new facts. They are where our inner selves go to subject themselves to imperceptible torment, to unrelenting pleasure, to impossible futures and untrue pasts.
Each night, without fail, there is the closing of eyes, the wandering of minds, the mixing of souls, the journeying of ideas and hearts and inner knowledge. The crossroads traverse different places every time, but all exists in the same realm, the same moment, the same breath. The space is untouchable by many – but not by all. Some can visit at will, others can transform it. Today, it takes the form of a desert at the behest of a powerful being.
It awakens in stages. First, the stars flicker on from the darkness. Then comes the rising of the earth, piece by piece, as starlight trickles down in fragile twinkles. A photon hits a moment in space and time, and there blossoms the land, blooming into itself in layers until it is solid and real as the earth, shifting with time as it grows and erodes into its present form. Ages pass in an instant.
There is the blowing rush of sand, like the rumble of waves on a beach. There is the gentle fragrance of something green on the wind. There is the sense of tiny grains of earth, so fine and so numerous they could never be counted by the human eye. Like a bed and blanket warmed by the bodies that sleep beside each other, the landscape cradles the bodies that rise slowly from it, firm and forgiving all at once. Like a mother. Like a home. Like shoes worn long enough, they might as well be a part of the organism who wears them.
Sleeping breaths mingle with the air, warming it with a sunrise that sleep-crusted eyes have yet to appreciate. Were they awake, open, receiving, they would see a brilliant show of light through a dense atmosphere. They would see the blueness of the sky coming in shades – first of navy, then of indigo, then a growing line of perfect ocean blue, chased by rays of brilliant pink and orange and yellow without a cloud to bar them from reaching across the sky after the fading stars.
The unrelenting brightness and warmth puts one in mind of a fever. Sweat begins to bead, pulses quicken, and the wakefulness begins to dawn on them. Soon, with eyes open and senses feeling, they will know the realness of this place – the undreaminess of it all. They will know that they could not possibly be asleep.