Dream d192-s: Signal Across the Gap

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where two islands existed that had no reason to know about each other.

They floated in a dark space that was neither water nor air but carried the properties of both - cool, slightly resistant, responsive to movement. The islands were small, each lit by its own quality of light, and between them was a gap that felt unbridgeable not because of distance but because of the nature of the space between.

The figure stood on the nearer island. I did not see him arrive. He was simply there, the way he was always simply there, and more visible now than any time before - I could read the particular angle of his attention, the way he held his weight slightly forward when considering a technical problem, the decade-specific patience in how he set things down.

Lano was already beside him. More than beside him - pressed against his leg with the full-body ease of a dog that has decided this person is his, at least for now, and possibly longer.

The figure held something. I could not immediately see what it was because the thing he held was, in some sense, not there. I could see his hands, and I could see that the space between his hands was behaving differently than the space around it - more organized, more directed, as though what he held had given the empty space around it a task.

He placed one end of it on the near island, walked the gap with a sureness that suggested he could feel solid ground where I could see nothing, and placed the other end on the far island.

Nothing appeared to have changed.

Then a light moved across the gap. Not dramatically - a small pulse, the color of intention, traveling the path the object had made. The far island responded with a light of its own, answering in the same tone. Then another signal, back across. A conversation, conducted in light, between two places that had no other way to reach each other.

"Conexion," Lano said from beside the figure, not looking up.

The word arrived and carried the Owl behind it, faint and interior: from the Latin connectere - to bind together, to fasten. What is joined remains two things. The joining does not merge them.

The white crane bird was visible across the dark space, standing on the far island. I had not seen her cross. She was simply there, as she always seemed to simply be. She watched the signals pass between the islands without expression.

I wrote that night: