Dream d171-s: He paused. A very long pause.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano barked and the sound was visible.

"MIRA."

Not a word, exactly. A shape. The bark left his small white body and traveled through the void as a wave of amber-gold, bending the geometry around it the way heat bends air above summer stone. I watched it move outward from him in rings, each ring a slightly different color - gold, then copper, then something I can only describe as the taste of iron and cold water simultaneously.

I had been dissolving.

I understood this only when the sound hit me. Before the bark, I had no edges. My hands, which had gone translucent at the void's center, had continued their trajectory. I was becoming the garden. Not in a frightening way. That was the problem. In a way that felt like the most natural thing I had ever done, like finally agreeing to something that had been asking for a long time.

Then: "MIRA."

And I had edges again.

The owl was there, perched on a fold in the geometry that should not have been able to hold weight. He was watching Lano with something that looked like profound respect.

"Under-stand," he said. He said it slowly, separating the syllables with intention. "From the Old English understandan. To stand in the midst of. Not above, not outside. Among." He paused. A very long pause. "Your little witness understands you in the original sense. He stands in the midst of you. He knows where you end."

Lano was still watching me. His eyes were the color of warm amber, nothing like a dog's usual eyes. He did not look afraid. He looked like someone who had been waiting for this specific moment and had prepared for it carefully.

I looked at my hands. Solid again. The translucence was gone, replaced by the familiar particular weight of having fingers, having palms, having a body that took up space and required things.

The void at the Gardens' center still glowed behind me. Still beautiful. It had not become less beautiful because I had almost entered it. That was the thing the owl had been trying to tell me, I thought, and had not quite managed to say directly.

"The danger is not that it is terrible," I said aloud.

"No," the owl agreed.

Fragments of myself - I can think of no other word - began gathering back from the edges of the void. Small specific things: the smell of the distillery, the weight of the notebook, the particular sound of train wheels on cold rails. They returned like birds to a window ledge, one then another then several at once.

Lano walked to me across impossible ground and sat on my foot.

I wrote in the notebook, the handwriting fully solid now for the first time since entering the void center: