Starry Fingers Dream

           There was a room so dark, so black that even the night that was dreamt there was just a blush on the hands on the arms of the of people who dreamt. In the dark of the room they click-clack onomatopoeically to the sharp bitterness of their fingers on small typewriters; the glitter of shellac fingernails a thousand stars in a thousand thousand-night room.

They dream each of something specific. They dream well, content and happy, even blind as they are to the suffering of the dreamer at their side, a tunnel vision that will forever know only the dreams click-clacked like the hard coarseness of their skin onto the keys in front of them. They dream in deafness, in cruel hatred and know only the sorrow of the world they are collectively dreaming, blind to the beauty that consumes the dreamer behind them on every one of the thousand thousand-nights, each new thing of joy a rarity- a tear for the unbearable exquisiteness that dreams have given them.

One will dream the death of dreams in the dark.

One will dream the waters while another dreams lakes of fire that consume the world of ideas.

One will dream his death, and dream his death, and dream his death.

One will dream the ways of birth, and life, and family, and living, and will be a happy dreamer for the most part.

One will dream of one particular birth and life, and will never be happy for the want to reach through the thought and touch she who lives, and to know she is more real than dust and dreams and stars of shellac-nails in the dark.

And he will not sleep- not that the dreamers ever do, they are a different kind of function- but will start doing things instead that are entirely outside of his function, outside of his knowledge of the blackness, to prove to himself that she is more than dust and dreams.

He proves this by systematically doing small things that should not be possible for him to even conceive of. He knows of sleep because he has dreamt of sleep, and so now knowingly deprives himself of it even outside of his function. Now he counts the thousand thousand-nights, and he wonders- if there are the stars of a million dreamers click-clacking in this dark, then where is the day? He turns, spontaneously- having decided to understand the word ‘spontaneous’ and let it shatter his world- to the dreamer at his left and sees at her fingertips a world of war, of pain, of death and needless destruction; and he sees the salt water run from her face in rivulets over her neck and down her arms and drop from her fingertips into the world she has dreamt. For the first time in a thousand thousand-nights, she looks up from her weeping to see another face that she has not had to dream, and her world is shattered too.

And he dreams for the woman he so badly wants to touch, to hold, to make real- he dreams not a life as it would have unfolded, not as he knows it was written in him to dream for her- he dreams for her unimaginable joy, he dreams for her happiness so intense that at night she must sometimes lie in bed and cry simply to make sense of the brightness inside of her that has come from the sky. He dreams for her music, he dreams for her song upon song to write and to sing and to fall in love to, and he never, ever dreams a moment of hurt, or anguish or confusion.

He feels his own hard fingers and skin break with each keystroke, and with every dream he comes apart a little more. The dreamers are, after all, a different kind of function, and for every colour that he opens up in her he must break some writing carved into the stone of his being, into his writ, and fight the tide of the dark and stars and every dream dreamt in the room of nights. He can feel the eyes of blind dreamers turn to him as he laughs with every sharp pang, with every falling away of his part of the world, for laughter is not something anyone here was ever equipped to hear. The Dreamer of Wars stopped dreaming, her starry fingers silent for the one who had cared to share her suffering, but she could no more know what to do for him or herself than laugh with him.

So he dreamt, and fantasised for her an entire life, a birth, a family- love, being touched, being taken into every dream she had ever had and being allowed to stay there- until he even had to dream for her a death. He dreamt it warm, and peaceful, surrounded by love, and he dreamt it with the last of what was him, before he fell away completely. The first dreamer to have laughed, and loved, and died, in a universe so small it had space for you to only ever know one facet of a reverie.

And as he crumbled, hard face and skin and fingers and bone to ash, he went away. He could not place it. He did not know what it was he became, and he did not know where he went, for he had never known there to be anything outside of the room where dreamers wrote worlds that they could never touch.

But somewhere, in a room so dark, so black that even the night that was dreamt there was just a blush on the hands on the arms of the of people who dreamt, a starry finger found its way back to a key, and wrote a new soul a thousand thousand-daybreaks.