Dream d169-s: Soul Made Visible

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where my memories were leaving through the flowers.

Not lost - departing. Each one lifted from somewhere inside me with the particular weight of a thing that knows it is going, rose through the oversaturated air of the dissolution heart, and settled into a petal, a stem, a fold of bioluminescent leaf. I watched a morning from long before this journey - something ordinary, a table, a particular quality of light through a window - drift upward and become part of a flower I could not name. The flower was more beautiful for it. That felt important and terrible simultaneously.

Lano was barking.

Not his warning bark or his attention bark. Something more urgent, higher, the bark of an animal watching something be taken. He snapped at a fragment drifting past - a face, someone familiar, rendered in the gold-and-violet light of the Gardens - and his teeth closed on nothing. The fragment continued upward and joined a cluster of blooms that now held something of a voice I recognized.

I pressed the notebook to my chest the way I had learned yesterday, when the dissolution had taken my edges. The notebook held. The pages remembered what I had set down - the trap clearing, the fork, the descent, the silent zone, the voiceless garden's perfect seduction, yesterday's crisis with my translucent hands. The Gardens had not taken what I had written. Only what I had merely remembered.

The owl landed on a branch made of light.

"Psychedelic," he said, watching a memory-petal drift between us. "From the Greek psuche - soul, breath, the animating principle. And delos - visible, manifest, brought to light." He tracked the petal with one ancient eye. "The psychedelic thing is the thing that makes the soul visible. Externalized. Out where it can be seen - and out where it can be caught by flowers, apparently." A long pause. "The Gardens are psychedelic in the original sense. They make interior things exterior. The question is whether you can afford to have your soul made quite so visible, quite so available."

Lano barked again at a rising fragment.

"Let them go," the owl said, not unkindly. "The little witness cannot catch them. Neither can you. But notice: what rises is what was only held in memory. What stays is what was held in action, in making, in the setting-down of words."

I opened the notebook and wrote while another fragment lifted from me - something from years before this journey, the specific texture of a place I had loved. It hurt to watch it go and become a flower. The flower was extraordinary.

I wrote that down too.

I wrote: