Dream d166-s: Where Language Cannot Follow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the owl's beak opened and nothing came out.

Not silence exactly. Silence has a texture, a weight, the particular pressure of sound withheld. What came from his beak was something prior to silence - the condition before sound decides to exist. It was visible. It moved like smoke but slower, and it tasted of the color just before blue becomes violet.

He had been mid-sentence. Something about psychedelic, I think - I had caught the Greek root psuche before the zone took his voice, the way a wave takes a footprint. His eyes went very still. Then, with the deliberateness of a being who has lived long enough to know when arguing is useless, he raised one great wing and held it pointing down the path.

A warning or a direction. With the owl, these were often the same gesture.

Then he was gone. Not flying away - simply no longer present in the way he had been present, which in the Gardens amounts to the same thing.

Lano pressed his whole side against my leg.

We stood at the edge of the silent zone together. I could see the silence in there - it had geometry, repeating in patterns that should have required sound to sustain them, tessellations of hush. The bioluminescence here did not pulse. It held. Everything held. Even the temperature had stopped shifting, locked into a cool that was the exact color of waiting.

I took a breath and the breath made no sound entering me.

Lano looked up. "Lano," I said, to test it, and felt the word leave my mouth and dissolve before it reached him. He shook his ears - he had heard something, or felt the shape of a word that had not arrived.

We walked in.

The impossible geometry was gentler here than the trap clearing, less invitation than simple fact. Angles that should not meet, meeting. Paths that curved back through themselves without returning to their origin. I had my notebook but when I opened it the pages held only what I had already written - nothing new would come, not here, as if the zone had rules about inscription as well as sound.

Lano moved differently without sound. More careful. More present. Each step a complete thing.

I thought of the merged figures in the trap clearing - how they had opened their mouths in gestures that might have been speech or laughter. Here I understood something about that differently. Perhaps some of them had entered a place like this one and simply stayed, not from forgetting but from the relief of it. The beautiful exhaustion of a world that did not require you to name anything.

Lano nudged my hand.

I held his ear between my fingers and we kept moving.

That night, at the zone's far edge where sound returned gradually like warmth after cold, I wrote: