Dreaming Memory
Prose poem prompt: Liminal landscapes
Afloat — in this oceanic unconscious realm, tossed from one dream-wave to another, leaving nothing but swirling fractals of myself behind, miniscule particles of salt suspended in seawater, soon dissolved. Dreaming memory works in reverse, instantly destroying what was made. Yet, sometimes, I emerge onto the shores of conscious life, with salt on my cheeks, wondering are they tears, or traces of the sleeping mind’s unbridled imaginings?
Now that Hypnos has had his way with me— holding me under his watery spell of sleep — every night I must learn again how to breathe underwater, growing gills where the skin of my neck is softest. Floating through cities I visited as a child, buildings looming over me, submerged underwater like modern Atlantises. Swimming above the wreckage of abandoned longings, drunken ghost-ships leaning forever starboard with no stars — never again — to guide their path. I try not to get trapped in their half-loosed sails and rigging — groaning hulls emitting strange calls like lost whales. I’ve survived another night.
If you reach out to touch me now, will your fingers pass right through me — or slow down, as if moving through water? I am barely there. Watching my feet walk far below me, in this liminal realm between the ocean of sleep and the grainy shores of waking life, I walk…
