Staccato Dreaming

Went to sleep: 3 AM

Woke up: 4 AM, 6 AM, 7 AM, 8:30 AM, 9 AM

Got up: 10 AM

Figure half an hour to get back to sleep every time I woke up, sometimes a little more.

In those brief moments of dipping into Morpheus' realm, he and I danced frantic steps, a tarantella of images, sounds, impressions, whirling past my mind's eye, dizzying.

Morpheus, by the way, tends to step on your toes when he's dancing with you. But he has a nice smile and laughs freely, and he's always sorry after, if he bruised your piggies.

I dreamed of fire. Of looking at a map on the computer, some sort of satellite image, and seeing fires raging from Texas up to Canada and East to Alabama. Walls, curtains of flames flickering, eerily still and silent, not marching onward but just...there. They could not be extinguished, and I remember remarking that someone set the Salamander loose.


I dreamed of wind, sweeping across the continents, a wall of air scrubbing the land clean. Trees bowed, bent, or broke. Houses lost roofs, people were flung about like rag dolls. It was relentless, a sound that accompanied day, night, thought, constant, notable only in its rare absence. The Sylphs were on the march.

I dreamed of a flood, flowing forth from a bathroom sink, filing the house I was in, flowing outward into the neighborhood that looked alien in the dream but was, I knew, a place I'd lived before. The water filled every hollow, every declivity, rolled and rippled onward until it built itself into a tremendous wave...the Undine making her presence felt.

I dreamed of trembling earth, of mountains tumbling down, landing in scattered piles of stone, dirt, debris. Trees toppled, and houses and buildings, and no one could take a steady step - walking required loose hips, loose backs, or the ability to float above it all. The surface cracked, and out poured gas, fire, heat, and a sort of howling, creaking, shrieking noise, as if the planet was being rent to her core...and the Gnomes were tunneling, tunneling, tunneling...

I dreamed of a space shuttle going up, up, up... I was there, outside the shuttle, perhaps a cloud or the wind itself, watching the fragile roaring tube force itself through the air and into the cold dark. At the same time, I was a person on the ground, in a tall building. I was trying to find all my possessions in a room and pack them up, carry them downstairs. As I worked, I was reassuring someone else in the room that the shuttle was fine, that now was ignition, and now it was climbing, and now the main fuel tanks were done and shed, step by step telling the other person what was happening and that everything was fine.

I was carrying boxes down the stairs, wondering when I got all this stuff in my short stay, and a little grumbly because someone was supposed to be helping me but he (don't ask me who - in this dream, everyone was "someone", indistinct, amorphous) was too busy doing...I don't know what, but it wasn't helping. I had to be certain I got everything out. I don't know why, only that it was urgent.

All of these things I dreamed in minutes, snatches, fragments, staccato dreaming coming in fits and starts as I tried (without trying, because making an actual effort to sleep rather defeats the purpose) to sleep.

I wonder what I will dream tonight??