D U N E
- ☾ -
I
t starts, predictably, with darkness. Darkness and a feeling of pressure on all sides, intense, just on the edge of unbearable. (He’s learned to not describe anything as unbearable, because there is no such thing. There is no limit to the torment that can be endured by the resolute. Things come close to unbearable, but never cross that line unless you let it.
Maybe he’s full of shit, or maybe you can want something to be so true so much it actually happens.)
It starts with darkness and pressure and silence. Silence of the complete-and-total variety. Who’s to say how long it lasts? Without any senses there is no measure of time, just a vague uncomfortable sense of being.
When his heartbeat enters the fray, at first he does not recognize it. It has the sound of something out of space, something that has travelled very very far (though in that place distance, like time, lost its meaning) to arrive, finally, with gentle insistence. A knocking that could not be ignored. And, once the strange sound is recognized as the corporeal process it is, just like that-- the rest of his body follows.
Dune enters the dream with a soft, wet pop! The effect might seem celebratory, if it were not followed by the sound of the boy gasping for air. He fills his lungs like a man brought back from a watery death, and to his instant disappointment the air is... unfulfilling. Dull, leaden, somewhat metallic. It’s like filling yourself with an ancient stillness, a heavy slowness.
It feels like a violation. Frankly, it’s gross.
He turns to see a horned man, all his cracks filled with gold- the dreamer- and glances past the figure to where a heavy red sun swells above the horizon. Everything is painted by a star in its death throes, and there is a sense of… of resignation, seeping from the pores of the dream. This is what it’s like to know that soon the light will be turned out, and it will never turn on again.
“Oh yikes. Heavy stuff, man.” There are already wings sprouting from his back, plain black wings that, fully grown in a matter of seconds, drag lightly against the grass. (The color of the grass reminds him of the quicksilver tears of a beautiful star he once met. A lovely memory.) He always had a fondness for ravens, and often took their form- or at least parts of it- in dreams. “Come here often?” A leap forward and a single, powerful thrust of the wings- the thick air embraces his winged body with an ease that makes him grin like a child. Dune circles the dreamer lazily as he peers across the landscape, hardly needing to beat his wings to stay afloat.
And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?
