Dream d176-s: The Garden Speaks First

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano suddenly went rigid beside me, ears flat, a sound rising from his chest that was not quite a growl and not quite music.

"Mira," he said. And I looked.

The meeting garden had arranged itself while I was not watching. Around a low stone table that may have grown up from the ground, figures sat in configurations that made sense only if you understood geometry as suggestion rather than law. Some faced inward. Some faced directions that did not exist. And yet the gathering had a feeling I recognized from the backs of my hands, from the way a childhood room feels when you stand in it decades later - familiar, and therefore strange.

The air tasted of copper and pine. The light shifted temperature with its color. When it turned amber, I felt warm at my temples. When it turned that deep undersea blue, the cold settled specifically behind my sternum.

I moved toward the table because the garden wanted me to. That is the only way I can describe it. Not compulsion. Invitation, but the kind you cannot decline without becoming smaller.

The Ancient Owl was already there, of course. Perched on nothing, technically. One eye half-closed. A feather was falling from his left wing in slow motion, slowly enough that I could see the individual filaments separating.

"You met the others," he said. It was not a question.

Around the table: a woman whose silhouette kept losing its edges, becoming briefly part of the hedge behind her. A man made of a light that cast no shadow. Two others I perceived more as presences than forms. All of them wore the look I imagine I wore - the look of someone who has been inside something vast and is now trying to hold the dimensions in ordinary eyes.

"They are returning," the Owl continued, settling his weight with the slow gravity of continents, "or they are going further. There is no option between."

Lano pressed himself against my shin.

"Tiempo," he whispered. Time.

The Owl's head swiveled toward him. "Yes. Little witness. From the Latin tempus - a stretch, a span. Originally related to temple, to the temples of the skull." He tapped his own head with the tip of one talon, absently. "The Romans felt time at the sides of the face. Where the pulse is. They were not wrong."

The falling feather had still not reached the ground.

I tried to speak to the others at the table. The woman whose edges dissolved smiled at something just past my shoulder. The shadow-free man nodded as if confirming a fact I had not yet spoken. There was recognition between us - not of names or histories, but of the specific quality of having gone somewhere that does not translate.

Before I left the table, I opened my notebook and wrote without deciding to write: