Dream d2426-s: Lit from Inside

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the ridge path at dusk, the packed earth still warm from the day, and the houses sat dark against the sky except for their windows. The windows were amber. One room lit in each house. I knew whose houses they were: the Hummingbird's, the Sterling's, the Weaver's, the Carrier's, the Crane's.

A small white dog walked ahead of me on the path. She kept stopping to look back, then forward again, as if weighing something. The path ran behind all the houses, close enough to hear through the walls.

They were all speaking. The Hummingbird's voice was quick and clipped, running over itself, checking the same beat twice. The Sterling's was layered, one frequency pressed under another. The Weaver's came in long slow sentences that gathered threads as they moved. The Carrier's shaped itself differently by the word, as if deciding the register mid-breath. The Crane's was the quietest, barely above a murmur, but it carried farthest.

None of them heard the others.

I stood still on the path and listened. The small dog sat beside me. The sky had gone a deep grey-blue behind the houses. The lit windows made the dark around them darker. I had the feeling you get in a room where several conversations are happening and you are in none of them: not excluded, just outside the circuit.

The voices were not sad. They were not frightened. They were complete in themselves, the way a single instrument is complete before an ensemble opens. That was the melancholy of it. Completeness without contact. The full silence was not absence. It was presence that had not yet turned to face itself.

The small dog pressed her side against my leg. We stood there until the last of the light went out of the sky and the windows were the only warm thing on the ridge.

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