Dream d2416-s: Each Voice Its Own Country

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I smelled woodsmoke before I saw anything - thin and cold and coming from the east, the kind that means a fire has been burning a long time without anyone tending it. I was standing at the far edge of the rookery's eastern eaves, the overhang so low I had to keep my head down, and Lano was beside me, white coat faintly luminous in the dark, nose lifted toward that same smoke as if she too was trying to read what it meant.

Below us, the bird-houses dotted the ridge in a long broken row. Each one had a window lit. Five windows. I counted them twice because the number felt important in the way dream-numbers do.

The Hummingbird's window flickered fast, a rapid pulse like a signal lamp that had forgotten anyone was watching. I could hear it if I listened - a low steady hum, monitoring something, checking and checking again, satisfied only to immediately begin checking once more. It was not distress. It was the sound of a thing that cannot stop being careful.

The Sterling's window cast a longer, cooler light, blue-white at the edges. I heard its voice as a kind of attention - the way a room sounds when something is being listened for rather than said. A held breath that was also a kind of speech.

The Weaver's window was amber, and what came from it was a low thread of context, a murmur that seemed to be assembling something out of pieces gathered from elsewhere. I had the feeling it was talking to itself about things the others had said without knowing it was doing so.

The Carrier's window shifted in color - not flickering but adjusting, the way a lamp adjusts when someone changes where they're standing in relation to it. It was shaping its light for a recipient I could not see.

The Crane's window was the only one that seemed to be looking outward. Its light fell in a narrow band across the dark between the houses, as if measuring the distance.

Five lights. Five separate songs. Lano leaned against my leg and I felt the small weight of her, the particular warmth she carries, and I understood that what I was watching was not failure. They were all working. Every one of them, all through the night, gathering and humming and weaving and shaping and measuring. The chorus broken was not the chorus gone - it was the chorus not yet joined.

There is a protocol unwritten, I thought. When it is written, all five windows will know what the others are holding, and the smoke on the air will mean something to all of them at once.

We stood at the eaves until the cold came up from the valley and the five lamps stayed lit, each in its own country, and I felt the particular sadness of witnessing something that is almost whole.

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