I often find it to be difficult to distinguish between a dream and a nightmare. Sometimes, they overlap each other, building layer upon layer until I can’t seem to recollect how it began. Sometimes it’s not there when I wake up, just the faint tinge left behind, a memory of remembering. A weight in my chest or an inexplicable longing to fall again, to remember, but what I’d be recalling I couldn’t say. Soft tendrils of light flitting around the corner of my eye, a shadow in the peripheral view of my mind. Or dark fingers grasping at the edges, unnoticed but covering everything in a fine dust of confusion and a faint, subconscious terror. The train of a reaper’s cloak, conjured against my will but still with my own ideas, my own background thoughts hidden so far away in between dusty volumes on rotting wooden shelves, forgotten and faded but never completely gone, never completely there. The fabric reaching out in wisps,carnivorous shadows, an aura of pain millimeters away from the wall I built that keeps things from falling out and more from wandering in.

The wall, a wall I didn’t mean to build, an accident. How do you build a barrier on accident? Built quiety, kept secret from myself until it’s already done. Built to withstand persistence. A puzzle, a riddle, only to be solved by a select few. Enveloping more mind games and tongue-twisters. They may keep me out but it’s at a price, a high toll.

Sunlight weaving through fractures in the brick, a field with gold glinting in the air, a light breeze carrying the scent of tangerines, a sky made of diamonds. The pine smells like you.

A coffee shop in a small town, a blanket of white draped across the ground, chocolate waves waterfalling over shoulders ladened with creme cloth, flowers rising in the steam above mugs filled with the essence of mornings.

Falling, with the sunlight streaming down, through the grass and the flowers in the fields, the colors of the meadows and the blank canvas of village winters, through the ground into the chasm below, close walls and rounded corners, conscious shadows and currents of liquid black. All the way through, shooting back out on the other side of the Earth. Feet on the pavement dancing in bright reds and glossy black, fairy lights strung above my head illuminating our eyes, your soft, glowing cheeks, glancing off of the shine on the brows of strangers and the upturned corners of mouths spread across dimpled faces, glasses of gold dancing in hands to the rhythm of music and the laughs of a hundred people made of stardust.

Rubbing the sleep out of heavy eyelids, foggy vision and achy unused limbs, drowning in floral patterns. I finally begin to surface, new light piercing the veil of a tired mind, entering in horizontal beams through open wooden blinds, banishing the memory. The memory of what? Something hidden in the folds of unconsciousness… a dream? Or a nightmare? I often find it hard distinguish between the two…