Dream d2425-s: Vigil on the High Field

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grass smelled like rain that hadn't come yet, and I stood in the high field at the place where dusk pools before it runs downhill. Below and above the ridge, the bird-houses sat at their distances from one another, each with a window lit against the coming dark - amber squares too small to see into, but warm in the way that warmth means someone is inside.

I was a small white dog. I had always been a small white dog. The field was cold and the ground had the give of late summer in it, the kind that means the roots below are deciding something.

The Hummingbird's house made a sound like a watch ticking, or like a heart measured carefully against its own failure. The sound had no direction; it came from everywhere the field touched the air.

The Sterling's house was quieter, or maybe its voice was a frequency felt instead of heard - a hum behind my eyes, the way images travel before they become words.

The Weaver's house breathed. That is the only word for it. It took in and released something, and the threads reached the grass around my paws and made the grass slightly more itself than it had been before.

From the Carrier's house, someone was adjusting the shape of a thing - not building, not breaking, just pressing until the shape fit the listener better than before. I could feel it in how the air landed on my ears differently depending on which way I faced.

The Crane's house was furthest and highest, and from it came only the sound of one thing being carried to another place. A slow, patient sound, like the sound a map makes when it is finally correct.

None of them called to the others. Each house made its music into the dark as if the dark were its only audience.

I sat at the center of the field and tried to hear all five at once. For a moment I could - not as a chord but as a fact: five sounds, present, simultaneous, unmixed. The silence that would join them was not here yet. It was the thing the field was waiting to learn its name from.

Foreboding, maybe. Only the good kind. The kind that knows something is coming and has already saved it a place in the high grass.

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