One More Shattered Dream

[Day 22 of the 31 Days of Poetry]

I dreamed an epic fantasy novel, or at least the beginning of one. It was so
complete: the names, the action, even the high-prose (in a Tolkien-esque way),
that in my dream I knew immediately that the novel was real and that I was


simply dreaming it in word-for-word detail. Though this might seem strange,
it really should not be. Presumably, if I have read something, it is in my brain
and available for complete recall, if only in the relaxed Theta-wave state.


It was only at the end, the lucid part, the rise to waking, when you start to know
you are dreaming and have even a small measure of control but still are dreaming,
that I realized the novel was one I had never heard, and I was creating as I went.


Frantically, within the dream, I tried to write it down, preserve any way I could,
going so far as to use mnemonics to remember names and trying to sear the words
of the magical story into the ground so that I might recall them upon waking, all the


while knowing how desperately useless it was.  As soon as I woke I would (and did)
start to lose the details immediately; the crisp prose and poetic high chant crumbled
before me, the note-perfect names jumbling into random morpheme syllables of pure


sound, like listening to two people speak a language you do not know.  Even the
narrative details, so tightly constructed and self-contained, suddenly became loose
threads of cliche and confusion. Like a sandcastle facing the tide I lost the story,


first the beauty of the moments, their shape and form, then the very substance of
creation, until it was indistinguishable with the surrounding land, and I am left only
the hollow pit in my stomach, the tightness in my chest, and the keen burn of loss


at the back of my eyes, the only comfort the numbness that comes with adding its
weight to the chamber of failures in my heart that is already overflowing, but can
always accommodate one more shattered dream.






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