Dear Dreamer

1st May 2004

Dear Dreamer

Where are you now?

Me? At this time when I’m half asleep, dizzy and the world is swaying? Let me close my eyes and see.
I’m on the swaying deck of a ship out at sea.
She’s a tall-masted, stout-hearted old schooner of the seas. It’s the deathwatch, last watch before dawn, and I am alone.  I know that beneath hatches slumber my fellow shipmates, snoring sonorously in swaying hammocks. Yet I could be treading the deserted decks of a ghost ship for all that their presence reaches above the wooden boards that separate us.  
I hold the fate of all these lives, adrift in this tiny husk, in my hands. But do I stand at the tiller, directing our path? No, for it is lashed in place, holding course steadily East, onwards into the realms of the sunrise.
And I? I stand poised upon the bowsprit, as far to the fore as I can go, ever eager to reach ‘destinations unknown’. Perched as upon a raging steed, to prevent a silent and sudden fall to my inevitable end, I clasp the singing ropes in a death grip.
Balanced precariously upon the slender spar, I hold my breath in the plunging rush down every wave. Plunging down into the trough, my cape billows out behind like the wings of some ancient draconic beast. Without its protection, I can feel the cold wind slipping its icy fingers beneath my clothes to caress my skin.
A shock of spray hits my face as the descent ends and once again I travel towards the heavens. Looking out across the roiling landscape that is my world, I notice almost abstractedly that the pale sheen of starlight has touched the tips of the waves with a lingering luminescence, no bold silvery moonlight to gild the night.
Flinging my head back I yell out to the sky, to the world, to the stars. “Freedom!” That is what I say and feel and believe, for where else but here, alone on the sea beneath the vault of the sky, could one ever be so free?
Exhilarated by my wild rush into the beyond, full of the power of motion, drunk on the heady brew of aloneness, I feel like a God, an all-powerful being with the universe contained within the spread of my outflung fingers.
Yet staring into the infinite, I loose myself for a while behind the scarf of the Milky Way, beyond the reach of Orion’s arrows, further south than the Southern Cross.
And spiralling slowly back into my self, I discover just how small I am.
One could feel insignificant in such immensity; so much which has to be more important than just this one being.
But no, no! That cannot be true. For the God that contained the universe was I myself, and so I am the universe and it is me, each a part of the other.

Come back, Dreamer, come back before you drift too far. Your travelling has tired you. Lie back now, in warmth and comfort, and tell me where you go.  

I am in a nest. It sways at the top of a tall, tall tree. The tree is perched on the brink of a cliff; no not a cliff, that is to small a word to describe the dizzying depths to which the precipice plunges. And yet I have no fear.
For I am Icari, one of the bird-winged race that soars unto the skies!
It is early, before dawn, and I snuggle further into the soft down that lines the nest. I know that soon I must hear my mother calling me. “Arise, little Philomel,” she will say. “It is time to greet the dawn.”
I am not yet old enough to spiral on the updrafts as the elders do, seeming to float up upon the waves of air that rise from the ground so far below. Each morn they sing the sun into being. I long for the day when I can be a part of this, the solemn ritual mixed with unquenchable joy.
But for now, I can barely flutter from the nest. And so I wrap its warmth and safety round me like a blanket and try to drift back into my slumber; for the dawn is not yet and in my dreams I fly!

Oh, Dreamer, what pleasant places you travel to. Come, tell me more.

It’s cold. Why is it so cold? I’m freezing and there is no light. Why can’t I see, don’t you know I’m afraid of the dark? Why are the walls so close? I can’t breath, there’s not enough space, and the walls are too close. They seem to be closing in. I don’t like this; no I don’t like this at all. It’s cold and small and dark, and I’m afraid, afraid of cold and small and dark. Help me; I can’t stand it much longer. Help! Help!!

Dreamer, Dreamer can you hear me? Everything is all right; you are here with me, safe with me. I am here, Dreamer. Where are you?

Home.
For home is where the heart is, and here in your arms, I am home.

Oh Dear Dreamer, stay here then.
And thank you for the travellings you have shared

Your Waking