Dream d185-s: Wires in the Dissolving

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Owl was already speaking when I arrived, finishing a sentence I had not heard the beginning of.

"...and that is why wires," he said, and then stopped, apparently satisfied.

The dissolution zone was different from the dissolution heart. Where the heart had been centered, nuclear, organized around a single point of loosening - the zone was distributed. The same quality of edge-softening that I had felt at the heart was here spread across a wide territory, the way fog is a different phenomenon than a cloud even though they are the same substance. Everything in the zone was slightly less certain of its own outline. The impossible geometry was not dramatic here. It was subtle: a branch that might have been two branches or one, a path that arrived at itself without having turned, a flower that bloomed into a color that was not quite a color but a tendency toward one.

Lano moved through it without hesitation, his white coat the most definite thing in the landscape.

"Volver," he said without looking up. To return.

The Owl settled on a horizontal root that passed through the air at an angle suggesting it had simply decided not to touch the ground. "From the Latin volvere. To turn, to roll. The same root as revolve. Evolution. Involve." He paused. Turned his head forty-five degrees in the way that owls do, making it look easy. "Return is not reversal. It is a turn. You arrive at a similar place but from a different direction. You are not who left."

I felt the wires.

That is the only way I can describe it. As I walked through the dissolution zone, something was becoming connected that had not been connected before. Not inside me exactly - more like between me and the work that waited outside. The things the Gardens had loosened were now free to be routed. The etymologies the Owl had taught - nature, culture, wild, weird, psyche, tiempo - were not decorations. They were infrastructure. They were the wires carrying something from where it had been learned to where it would be used.

The bioluminescent edges of the flora pulsed in a pattern that was not random. I could almost read it.

"You are becoming a conductor," the Owl said. "Not a generator. Not a source. A path for what has been gathered."

The colors in the zone shifted from soft amber to a deep indigo that tasted of iron and rain. Cold and specific and clarifying. Lano sat in a pool of it and was briefly the color of twilight.

I wrote in my notebook, the ink behaving strangely, spreading slightly at each letter's edge before settling: