palace of winds

My dreams lately have been the ordinary gone strange. Two nights ago I am Neil Gaiman having a usual morning with my wife and daughter, all toast and tea and then getting ready to leave on errands and discovering that the paparazzi have surrounded the house, and then needing to take some medication — there is the alternating vague sense that it is for anxiety, or a heart condition, or asthma. The big white pills stick in my throat and I keep casting around for something to swallow them with; I find can after can of diet coke with only a half swallow left and the pills are going bitter and sticky and I can’t get them down. (I wake with a faint shame at having dreamt myself into Neil Gaiman’s personal life; I feel sorry and a little creeped out on his behalf.)

Last night I am attending a wedding; it is an evening affair, all a whirl of preparations, fine food, fine gowns. The ceremony itself is in a smaller building separated from a stately stone mansion by an enlarged version of my back yard. I am in simple peach silk and I’ve come out of the main house at last to head back to the festivities. It is a dark, damp evening; though the stars are all out now it had previously been raining, and shortly the soggy ground gives way to a marsh, and a little further still a whole lake has formed. I stand just where the water begins, my shoes sinking a little into the soaked grass. There is no other way to the wedding; I hesitate and then, knowing there’s no helping it, wade in. The water is cool and very clear; beneath everything is black-green, a world of waving velvety vegetation and old tires and the occasional silver glint of fish and stars. I dive down, skirting tree trunks, all sleek silk and drifting hair.

(Not, that is to say, that we have old tires in our back yard, because we don’t. But if your brain is dreaming up an eerie nighttime world where your yard’s gone all towering oaks rising from dark water there’s bound to be some interesting, if inauthentic, lakebottom debris involved.)