Remembering The Revenant's Role

The dreams are always the same. The dreams are never the same. Or rather, the elements never coalesce in quite the same way twice, though there is repetition to the themes. Oh, I do wish there was some way to be clearer about all of this, but you know dreams. They are so set in their peculiar ways, and they make their own kind of sense. They have that dream-logic. You see people and they don’t look like themselves, though their identity is certain. You flash from place to place, though they might be in wholly different parts of the country. The world.

I’m beginning to suspect she doesn’t have dreams. I know, I know, everyone has dreams. And yes, its common to, having no practice in recollecting them, awake with no memory of those dreams everyone has. It isn’t her not remembering that I take as evidence, but the sort of sleeping she does. The sleep of the dead, you might say. Or the innocent, though that seems increasingly unlikely. Like a horizontal yogi, she selects some lithe position and holds it till morning. Then she’ll stretch like a cat; claws out and back arched, purring a little.

Then, 5 days out of seven, we fuck.

But that’s not the point.

In the dreams (my dreams, that is) the world is itself, only darker. And every entity presses, first, from the velvety panel of a night-time universe, then bursts into color. Into the color one can almost hear with the remarkably common synesthesia of dreams. Its nature, mostly, but sometimes buildings. Everything oddly proportioned. Not that I can see myself, but I’m present as my 13 year old self. Pre-adolescent and awkward and so aware that nothing about me is unchanging or ready yet for the world. And all the women I’ve loved begin to lurk into a clearing, only they are fawns. I mean, it’s them. We both know I know it’s them. But they are delicate, feminine deer. White tails and brown noses and dark eyes, with Bambi lashes.

It’s often now that I’ll notice there are birds singing with that spring-time urgency. Sirens, in both senses.

They stroll with varying steadiness and poise into the clearing and fold their spindly legs beneath their musky torsos. They first kneel, then lay about me in a circle, nibbling grass but mostly staring with those eyes, like ink-dipped marbles.

Then the silence is appearant, and the dead bodies of sparrows and robins rain down out of the card-paper-cut-out trees. Or, sometimes, from the pop-up-book power lines.

And that’s when I wake up. Wake up and see her sleeping still, in both senses.