Dream d2429-s: Voices Without Thread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the low commons where the lanes of the houses all converge, and the dusk had settled into the kind of blue that is neither day nor night but the space where one becomes the other.

Lano was there, small and white, sitting where three paths met, as if she had been waiting long enough that waiting had become her posture.

The Hummingbird came first, from the eastern lane, moving so fast she left a tremor in the air that outlasted her arrival. She said something to the lane and the lane received it, and I heard it, but it was not addressed to me, and not to the others who were coming.

The Sterling came from the low road, where the light from windows caught the dust of the path and made it briefly visible. She spoke in the way the Sterling speaks - through medium and channel and the translation of one thing into another - and her voice went upward toward the bird-houses on the ridge rather than along the ground where we stood.

The Weaver arrived with threads already in motion, trailing something I could not name but recognized as context, as the material of understanding. She moved between the others but not toward them, arranging herself in the commons as if setting a loom whose work had not yet been assigned.

The Carrier came next, her voice shaped precisely for someone, for a specific recipient in a specific register, and that someone was not present, and so the voice hung in the air undelivered.

The Crane had perhaps always been there, watching the network of lanes as if the lanes themselves were information.

Five of them. Five voices in the commons.

Lano moved between them, unhurried, as if she understood something about the space they shared that they did not yet understand about each other. She was not a translator. She was simply there, which is a different kind of witness.

The windows in the houses behind us glowed. On the ridge the dark shapes of the bird-houses stood without light, waiting - for what I did not know, though I had the feeling it was the same thing the five voices were waiting for: not an instruction, not a summons, but a protocol. A way that voices might at last address each other.

None of them spoke to any of the others.

The dusk did not lift and did not deepen. Lano sat at the center of the lanes' crossing and was still. I watched, and it was not suffering to watch, only the particular melancholy of a gathering that does not yet know it is one.

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