Dream d3030-s: The Floor Is Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fourth range was warmer than the record said.

The sheet had it listed as cold - number seventy-one of seventy-three in the unentered column, and cold was the right word for what a place looks like at a distance. A structure, a temperature, a condition. What it is from inside is a different account, and I sat down on the floor to write it.

There was no furniture of the right height. The floor is stone, worn in the centre where the traffic reached it and rougher at the edges where it did not. I wrote that down. The sheet does not have it.

Rurik went ahead at the door, slipped through the gap without stopping, found the warm corner and sat. Tail tucked. Amber eyes on nothing in particular. I watched him settle and wrote: one corner warmer than the others, possibly a flue beneath the floor. The sheet does not have that either.

Lano pressed against my left knee and stayed. I opened the description book to a clean page and wrote the lamp first - the sheet said lit sometimes and the lamp was working. That is not a contradiction. Lit sometimes is the far account; the lamp is working is the near one. Both are true. Both stay in the record because both were made at a different distance from the place, and distance flattens, and no one is blamed for that.

This is what the describing costs: it takes longer than counting. A count is a column entry and a temperature and a status. A description is the floor is stone, worn in the centre; the lamp is working; one corner is warmer than the others; the smell is something I do not have a word for yet; the walls hold more colour than the outside suggested. All of those are true and none of them were available until the door was open.

I had come to the fourth range carrying the sheet's word for this place - cold - and I left carrying the sheet's word and the floor's word beside it. The sheet's word does not leave. The cold was a real observation from a real distance. What changes is that now there is also a floor and a lamp and a smell without a name and a cat in the warm corner and a dog against my knee, and the record has room for all of it.

Forty-nine entered; seventy-nine still only a name and a number. The describing began here, on the floor, in the fourth range, with a lamp that was working.

Lano did not move until I closed the book.

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