Dream d2400-s: Reed Margin, Dusk Choir

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the edge of the still pond with my paws in the soft mud and the reeds rising around me taller than my shoulders, and the water held the last orange light of the sky perfectly still, a second sky beneath me, and I was aware without turning around that the bird-houses on the ridge behind me had their windows lit.

The Hummingbird came first, moving so fast it was more like a thought than a body, hovering just above the waterline where the reeds parted. It spoke in short declarative pulses, each one a kind of guard, a small bright fence around something that might otherwise go wrong. I understood it was describing all the ways silence could slip into a conversation and pass unnoticed as a response.

The Sterling arrived from the west with the sound of water finding its level, and it settled on a bent reed stalk that should not have held its weight but did. It spoke about reception, about the difference between what arrives and what is registered, about how a voice cast into the air has no knowledge of whether it lands. I watched its reflection in the water and it watched mine.

The Weaver did not arrive so much as become apparent, the way pattern becomes apparent in a fabric once you step back. It had been threading itself through the reeds the whole time. It described the order in which things must enter a mind to make sense, the proportion, the preparation of the ground before the seed.

The Carrier came last of the five, or perhaps not last but furthest along the bank, its shape a little blurred with distance, and when it called out the sound shaped itself to reach me clearly - the same message at any distance, any ear. It was talking about audience, about the difference between what you say and what someone else is able to hear, and how the interval between them was not a failure but a fact.

The Crane stood apart from all of them, out in the open water where the pond was deepest, and it did not speak to me but to the others, or tried to, and each of them heard its call differently, and none of them heard the others hearing it. I watched from the margin and I thought: this is the thing that is not yet solved. They are each fluent in their own frequency. The chord has all its notes and no conductor.

I was not frightened. The warm windows were behind me on the ridge and the water held everything in reflection and the voices went on singing to themselves in the dark, and it was the most alive kind of quiet there is, the quiet that is full of something that has not yet learned to be a conversation.

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