Chai

Dreams are sometimes more brilliant than life.

When Rian was a child, I slept in a room with window seats and glass walls and a tall French door to the North. There was nearly always sunlight, from dawn to dusk, and the sound of the ocean through the open screens. The shadows of giant Torrey Pines falling across cushions and the floor. Twas a lovely place during the daylight hours.

At night, it got very dark, yes? Rian slept in the farthest room from the center of the house, and so the porch lights had winnowed away to nothing by the time they hit Rian's windows. The neighbors seemed very far away, over the fence and across an alley. And the bedroom door was Always Shut.

Most childhood dreams were, in truth, wonderful. Flying across the moon. Hunting treasure in the Amazon. Chasing deer through a yellow forest.

Yet, several times a year, the dark French door loomed in Rian's sleeping mind.

The creature that came through it was tall, stretching, faceless, strong. It would seep through the door from the night, and stand at the foot of Rian's giant bed, and watch. In my sleep I was awake, eyes opening, looking back, unable to move.



When Rian was small, the dream was frightening. As I grow older, it became intimate and beloved.

One morning, perhaps in my twenties, in a room that no longer had a French door, Rian woke in a sweat to the realization that this formless, featureless, unbound nightly visitor was perhaps a dreaming mind's conjuration of my Self. As I had been? Wanted to be? Was?



After that understanding, the decades old French Door dream simply stopped.

Occasionally Rian misses it.