Dream d170-s: that you are becoming less specific.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the owl's voice arrived before the owl did - a sound the color of amber, thick and slow as cooling glass, saying: "Hollow. From the Old English holh - a cavity, a cave, an empty space that was once filled."

Then I saw it.

The center of the Gardens was not a place. It was an absence shaped like a place. Where the colors had been oversaturated - the bioluminescent blues, the impossible golds - here was something beyond color. A void that somehow glowed. An emptiness with dimensions.

I understood, standing at its edge, that I had been walking toward this without knowing it. Every path in the Gardens curves here eventually. Every perfume drifts from this hollow. Every geometry bends around it the way water bends around a drain.

Lano pressed hard against my leg. His small white body was the most solid thing in the universe. Everything else had become - approximate.

"Mira," he said, very quietly. Just that.

The owl materialized from the hollow itself, or perhaps from the space around it, landing on an edge that existed only because he needed something to stand on. His feathers were autumn. His eyes held the particular weight of having seen this particular moment before, many times, in many travelers.

"You've noticed," he said, "that you are becoming less specific."

I had noticed. My hands, when I looked at them, were slightly translucent. Not frightening - beautiful, the way ice is beautiful, the way you can see through something and suddenly understand it.

"Psychedelic," the owl said, apparently to no one. "From the Greek psyche - soul, breath, the animating principle. And delos - visible, clear, manifest. The soul made visible." He paused for what felt like geological time. "The Gardens are psychedelic in the original sense. They make visible what you carry."

What I carry. I tried to remember the weight of things - the notebook, the barn images, Lano's warmth in cold train carriages, the smell of the distillery, the summit cairn under wind. These felt like memories of another person. Solid things. Real things.

"Beautiful, isn't it," the owl said, not as a question. "Most travelers find it beautiful. Just before."

"Just before what?"

He turned one enormous eye toward me, then toward Lano, then back. "Just before they forget they came from somewhere. Before the hollow becomes the answer rather than the question."

Lano sat down on my foot. The pressure of him was extraordinary - warm, specific, undeniably present. Four paws, one dog, completely real.

I wrote in the notebook, my hand barely visible against the page: