Dream d177-s: Pages That Write Themselves

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the pen was already moving before I understood I was holding it.

Lano lay curled at the base of the tree, his breathing slow, his white fur lit from underneath by something in the roots. The grove smelled of cedar and something older than cedar. Old in the way that stone is old, not in the way that things decay.

I was writing. The pages received the words the way dry ground receives rain - quickly, completely, without resistance. I did not choose what came. The pen moved and I watched it the way you watch a river from a bridge.

The Owl read over my shoulder. I felt him there before I saw him. A warmth, and a particular quality of attention. The attention of something that has watched many things for a very long time.

"You are documenting," he said.

"I think so."

"From the Latin documentum." A pause long enough to hold a season. "That which teaches. From docere - to teach. Not to record. Not to preserve." He tilted his head at the moving pen. "The document teaches the writer. You did not know that when you began."

I looked at what I had written. The words were legible but the meaning arrived slightly after the reading, the way thunder follows lightning. Understanding with a small delay built in.

"Entender," Lano murmured without waking. Spanish drifting up from his sleep like steam.

The Owl made a sound that was almost laughter. "Your little witness dreams in two languages at once. Entender. From the Latin intendere. To stretch toward. To reach." He paused. "You understand a thing by reaching toward it. Not by grasping it. The reaching is the understanding."

The page filled.

I wrote about the meeting garden, about the figures whose edges dissolved into hedge and shadow. About the feather that never landed. About the way the light had weight and the weight had color and the color had temperature. Writing it did not reduce it. The grove held more after the words than before them.

The impossible geometry of the place arranged itself around the act of writing. Branches grew at angles that created reading light precisely where I needed it. The tree I leaned against curved to fit the shape of my back. The documentation grove understood what documentation was for.

Lano's ear twitched. His paws moved in small running motions.

"He runs in his sleep," I said.

"He runs toward what you write," the Owl said. "He will be there before you arrive."

I did not know what that meant. I wrote it down anyway.

When I finally stopped, the notebook was heavier than it had been. Not metaphorically. Measurably heavier, the way water is heavier than air, though you cannot say exactly when one became the other.

I wrote at the bottom of the last filled page: