Wake Up Call

Describe, if you would, your dream -- the one you had last night, for example -- so vivid, yet inexplicable.  Starring you, but a you so different from the face in the mirror this morning.  In a place so familiar, where you have nonetheless never been.  Does it exist at all?  Where walls are not boundaries, buildings go on and on transmuting into endless chains of rooms, hallways, stairs, department stories, trains stations.  Fascinating!  To you.  Not to me.  Not to anybody else, I hasten to assure you. Those fleeting details?  Oh, please, just stop.  Let it all go, release, open your eyes.  

Not you though.  You who, futilely shutting out every insistent piece of morning sun, would grab tight hold on that ephemeral chain of nocturnal events, determined to lay it out, repaint it, on the surface of more tractable daylight.  As if, then, I could see.  As if!  And do I really need to hear it? Dreams lingering like cob-webbed shreds, just shake, shake, shake them off, get ready for breakfast in a real kitchen, with solid walls.

The dream-time is shifty like that.  One thinks one is awake.  One picks up the toast and tastes the hot butter and feels the crumbs fall down one's shirt, so surely this, this is indisputable.  No one dreams of toast, and schedules, same old, same old -- nobody dwells, deliberately, in stories so mundane.

Forget the dream, you say.  Because here's the thing you really want to say, and it's important, I must realize -- this being my cue to look up, if only at the bridge between your eyes -- that's convincing, isn't it?  One bad actor me, maybe ... not that you're paying such close attention.  Wherever your eyes are focused, I'll surmise they are not directly involved, here, buttered crumbs and all.

It's quite a story, I grant you.  The one you lay on me.  You're pretty good at telling it, too -- you've had practice, this not being your first circulation.  Once upon a time I'd have easily obliged.  You would draw me in and take me through, until I felt your sheer frustration, shared your indignation, chortled willingly at appropriately positioned comic relief.  Your story would meld into mine, and where, oh where, do we go from there?

Remember this, remember this when you wake up.   This is the answer to everything.