June 21st, 2005, 6:31 am

Too hot to sleep: dreaming in the desert

It was Ireland, I think. A curve of green lines, etched in crayon, spraying out like the architecture of a leaf on a printed page. It was a dream, so when something told me to keep drawing out the map of where I was to go, I did so, curling around the existing lines, carving out a path of absolutely no resistance. As I drew, I fell in closer to the landscape, which morphed from lines on paper to black blue rivers of water, primordial veins slicing through sheer granite walls.

All of a sudden, I was in the pool I had just drawn, as if I had dived in one clean movement from the three dimensional world to another. The water was cool, and oddly safe — there was nothing else alive in this sphere. Somehow, I had come to the intersection of all of these rivers; where the water both bubbled up and swirled down, in undulating, calm movements that cared not for the agitations of outsiders. The slick wall of granite — obsidian, perhaps? — that buttressed the swells of the water ran deep, springing forth from a forbidden source; rising with a slight curve, they formed small plateaus, only a foot in diameter, only an inch underneath the cool black water. Caught in the center of the pool, I tried to clamber up out of it … as if by resting my body on the tiny plateau I could somehow find a way out of my predicament. But try as I did, I could gain no purchase, my toes found no friendly crags in the smooth, impersonal stone, and slipped again and again, and again as I tried to launch myself upwards.

In my final move, I placed my palms, flat, trusting, onto the top of the plateau. With a strength not mine I lifted, arched — finally! — only to see that those smooth impersonal walls met the smooth impersonal plateaus in a very sharp, very personal edge.

I woke before I landed.