Dream d178-s: The Path Remembers Straight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano's nose swung forward and stayed there.

He had been ranging, as he usually did in the Gardens - a few steps left, a few steps right, nose cataloguing things I could not detect. But now he stood perfectly still, oriented, pointing at something ahead with his whole body the way a compass needle points when it finally finds north.

I looked where he was looking.

The path was different. Not dramatically. Not with announcement. But where the paths of the Gardens had always curved back on themselves, folded, crossed their own earlier trajectories - this one ran ahead with something approaching intention. The geometry was still strange. Trees grew at impossible angles. Light arrived from directions that did not correspond to any sun. But the path itself had a quality I had not felt in a long time.

Direction.

"Psych," Lano said quietly.

The Owl landed nearby, higher than usual. Not on a branch at eye level but up in the canopy, where he had to look down to speak. A surveying position.

"Psyche," he said, as if completing a word Lano had begun. "From the Greek. The breath, the animating principle. What makes the body go. Later: the soul." A pause. He rearranged his feathers with the slow deliberateness of someone settling in for a lecture they have given before and still find interesting. "Psychedelic. Psyche plus delos - visible, manifest. That which makes the soul visible." He looked down at the path. "What is visible in you now is the part that knows it has somewhere to be."

The light ahead was different. Not brighter. Denser. The way light looks through a window when you have been inside a dim room for a long time.

I walked toward it. Lano did not need to be called.

The impossible geometry of the Gardens continued on both sides - a hedge that grew upward and also inward, a tree whose shadow moved independently of its trunk, flowers that were not quite the color they appeared when you looked directly at them. But the center of the path held. I put my feet on it and the path accepted my weight in a way that felt deliberate.

"The Gardens give freely," the Owl called from above, his voice coming down through layers of canopy. "They also take. You are carrying what they gave you. Check that you are not also carrying what they took."

I stopped. Checked. Lano was there. The notebook was there. I knew my name. I knew the date of my birth.

These seemed like the right things to have.

"Bien," Lano said softly. Good.

The light ahead thickened. The air tasted faintly of iron and grass. Not unpleasant. The taste of the outside, I understood, the taste of weather and open ground.

I wrote walking, which I had not done before: