In front of her towered a stone wall with a creeping relief of the creatures heads that sent her here. Mud dried under her feet and she walked forward to meet her fate.
The two heads stood over ten feet tall. Placed in the one face where a door would stare like a closed eye, here there was a real door. The knob a shiny brass bobble shedding rust and begging to be turned. She froze when she stared into the window in the face adjacent. Someone stood behind the glass, a shadow beneath years of uncleaning. He tipped his hat in her direction. Anne could not see his face and considered herself lucky for it, but she could feel him smiling.
She rushed like a rag doll falling into the arms of the door. It opened not with a squeak but with a growl. Walking through the eye that was a door, the entry way bled into a large room where she could now see the other side of the windows gaze. The shadow of the gentleman was gone. The tilted room led down in a hesitant slope breaking into a sandy shore. The waves of a great lake broke without a sound. What seemed an eternity to the water was only one resistant step. As waits at the shore of any dream waters, a ferry man beckoned. S/he did not lift its head but simply reached out an open palm. Anne reached in her pockets finding them empty of change but did find a safety pin. She placed it in the boatman’s hand. He closed it and stood in a moment of pause. Hand still extended, he stood sizing up her, her payment, her destination, or all of these things. His hand dropped without a word and Anne stepped on the boat. The silent waves made tiny sighs as they hit the side of the boat. Like a family of small children crying in the water. With his payment and his passenger, the boatman pushed off. A single blink of the eye and they sailed into the center of a lake hidden in an ocean’s elbow. Anne looked up only now realizing it was night in her dream and that the sky was in fact beautiful.
“I am dreaming” she thought.
Her own voice answered back, “You are the dreaming”.
They gentle rocking of the boat made the waves coo and Anne felt herself growing ever sleepier in her own dream.
“Where do we go when we fall asleep in a dream?”
Again her own voice answered with a tickle in her mind, “You are always here.”
“But where is here?”
“You are the dreaming”
Her eyes closed and the world went dark. She sang herself a lullaby in a little girl’s voice. A little girl watched her toes as she ran from the waves. The edge of a sundress painted with waves and sand that ran too fast during their game of tag and won. A giggle like shells falling over shells. A man’s voice whispered in a scream from behind her and the toes turned and ran toward shore. Anne awoke back in her dream. The boatman was gone along with the ocean that held them. She sat in the boat somewhere in the middle of a desert she did not know. The earth cracked around her as she watched tarring dirt skin, each time loosening a woman’s moan of ecstasy into the air. Anne stared down at her feet still bare and covered in mud from the other shore. When she stepped out into the sand the ground was warm. All the mud from her feet ran into the desert floor with a sigh. Here the moon was brighter then a June sun. Anne shielded her eyes from the shine on night.
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