Dream d430-s: Roberto Pulls the Thread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer laid two images side by side on the table and waited. The lamp threw a circle of warm light across the surface, catching dust in the air above the prints. One image was from the ceremony arc, early, maybe the fifth or sixth dream. A doorway I had drawn in my notebook with the frame still visible around it. The other was a frame from the Wireman's sequence, his hands wrapped in copper wire, fingers spread wide against a concrete wall.

I looked at the doorway. I looked at the hands. I did not see it.

Roberto climbed onto the table from the left side, his weight barely shifting the prints. He walked to the edge of the doorway image and sat there, then reached one paw across the gap and placed it on the Wireman's smallest finger.

"The frame," the Dreamer said. They leaned forward and tapped the doorway drawing. "You drew the frame of the door. You drew what holds the opening. And here," they moved their finger to the Wireman's hands, "he is holding nothing. His fingers are spread. The wire is what holds him to the wall."

I looked again. The doorway frame. The wire frame. Two kinds of holding.

"One holds an opening," I said.

"One holds a person to a surface," the Dreamer said. "You noticed that. I did not point it out. Write it down."

I opened the second notebook to a page already half filled with my coast road notes. The smell of the paper was specific, salt-worn from the five dreams I had carried it along the water. I wrote: frames that hold openings, frames that hold bodies to walls. I did not write what it meant. I wrote what was there.

Roberto had moved again. He was underneath the table now, nosing through a stack of prints I had sorted yesterday into a pile marked "underground." He pulled one out with his teeth, delicate, and dropped it on the floor where the lamplight just reached. Lano, who had been lying near the door with her chin on her paws, stood and walked to where the print had landed. She looked at it, then looked at me.

I picked it up. A tunnel ceiling. Condensation catching light from somewhere I could not identify in the image. Small bright points on dark stone.

The Dreamer took it from me and placed it above the other two. Three images now. Doorway frame, wire-held hands, wet ceiling full of scattered light.

"The frame holds the opening," the Dreamer said. "The wire holds the body. What holds the light to the ceiling?"

"Nothing," I said. "It is just water."

The Dreamer nodded once and said, "That is the one that matters. Find more like it."

Roberto was already back in the stack, looking.