A Grey Dream

Last night as I slept I dreamt a dream of white and grey.

In this dream I walk in a world laid silent and low under a sheet of pure white snow. A grey sky rolled overhead. Clouds low and shifting as with life. From the roiling mass an occasional dusting of new snow would fall, adding its mass to the slowly growing blanket smothering the world below, dulling all edges into soft curves as the cold of the air dulled my aching body and mind.

As I traveled the grey-white world in that slow-fast pace that can only be found in dreams and those odd moments when dreams meet the waking world in the mind of those half-asleep-half-awake, I found dull beauty, and loud silence.

Before me lay a frozen lake, as where I had just hour-seconds ago been in a yard made up of all the yards I have known winter in, I was now in a woods, made up of all the woods I have seen snow lay upon. Reflecting in the mirror still lake was a full moon of a size only found in fond but flawed recollections, or artistic depictions which are wanted flawed memories and dreams brought forth.

I stepped on the frozen lake, the glass-ice solid beneath me, a black water below it reflecting a living sky and the hints of stars in snow flakes freckling the surface, but ignoring me to do so. My steps making no sound I seem to glide slowly to the center or the lake, to the silver glow of the moon. In the span of no-time and eternity I reach the glowing grey disk that is the moon in the lake, it’s greater twin and source hidden by the greedy jealous clouds above.

Stepping onto the ice that floats above the water on which the moon is reflected a new cold passes through me. This cold is deeper than the cold of a northern wind, or metal left in winter's grasp. It’s a cold that cuts to my bones and chills the breath in my lungs. From the mental and physical numbness brought to me in this unreal world, this cold cuts through it, and brings with it a moment of almost lucidity.

I look at the world built around me, white and grey, silent and cold. I feel this place and know its meaning. Suddenly I am flush with heat coming from my core, the numbness stripped away by a rising of fear, panic, and rage. My body tenses as I feel the fibers that make up my being tense and strain, rejecting what I now understand around me.

The swelling of feeling, of energy, and movement from inside me takes root in my lungs, and I feel a primal yell build up in me. I raise my face to the grey sky, the clouds moving in a frenzy, speeding past and crashing into and over each other. I open my mouth, sucking in a breath of air so cold I feel ice in my throat. The cold air is warmed by the furnace of my body, but before I can release this shout and shatter the silence, a different sound of protest fills my ears.

The sound of shattering ice, splitting and cracking fills the void of sound before I can. Then before the heat of my soul and compel me to action, I fall into the silver-black water. It’s touch is so cold the shout is driven from my lungs as a frozen gasp, the mist of my breath like my soul escaping. The heat and tension of my body is cooled and slackened. With nearly no sound I simply slip under the water. The silver light of the moon that is not there is the only thing I see, as a retreating circle, like an eye closing to the world, as I sink deeper.

I try to reach up, the burning pain of the icy water already slipping back into the numbness of this place, my joints solidifying and my movement glacial. I can see my hand only as a blacking out of the sliver of the silver moon. The last of the air in my chest slips out, a bubble near white as it rises. The light fully fades, taking the world of grey, to one of black.

I gasp awake. My sheets cold, my breath smoke from my lips, frost making delicate shapes on my window. In the frost though, light, reflected a million times by prisms carved by cold, but light all the same. I sit up, chills running through me, each movement like freeing a tool from an encasement of ice. My hands are stiff and pale. I think back to what I mused before sleep took me last night. In a swelling of emotion and pain, I had wished that when I went to sleep, it, everything would all stop for me.

I think I almost had what I wanted.