Butterfly Dreams
Meditations: Perchance to Dream
© Ilah, 1999
Ice. The winter storm I have remained one step ahead of my entire travels has at last caught up; the snow must have begun to fall in earnest in the early afternoon if the accumulation of it across the ground as I woke was any indication. I snarl my irritation to the black wind that stirs the flakes at my feet into a shifting stream, curse and catch myself as my feet slip across frost slicked stones hidden beneath drifts of white. Flurries of it swirl around me, obscuring sight and stinging cold against exposed cheeks. I glance up but can see no farther than the span of my outstretched arms - the path that had wound through the pass so easily in the clearness of the former night has vanished into the falling snow, leaving me to flounder.
I unclasp chilled fingers and reach upward, finding the next hold by touch alone. A misjudged step had slid me from the slender curve of the path, dropping me several bodylengths below it before I had caught myself, heart pounding within my chest. In the summer months, when small mosses and tiny flowers dot the stones, this entire journey would have been the matter of only a few nights at best. Now, half blinded by flakes and chilled through, I swear roundly at the elements in this chilled northern clime and my own thrice damned cleverness as I shift my weight and pull myself up to where the path should be.
I feel the stone twist beneath my foot in the moment as my weight is balanced neither hither or yon. An instant of reaction as my heart pounds loud within my chest - hands grasping desperately, not quite in firm place, and feeling the lip of the stone edge break beneath my fingertips as I subject it to a weight and strength it was never meant to take. The gasp dies a-borning in my throat as balance and earth drop away... I know it in my mind's eye, the descent. A long drop, and naught but stone beneath. Fatal? No, not for I. But painful and injurious; I brace myself for it, for the plummet and impact below, cursing in a hundred tongues, wishing with futile strength for the impossible - stop, stop, STOP.
One heartbeat, impossibly loud in my ears, my veins. Another.
I slowly open my eyes, not daring to draw breath or move muscle. Balanced, palms splayed against the rock face before me, feet... foot... braced slipshod upon the remaining ledge as the snow swirls thick below the foot resting upon nothing but air. Off balanced. Pitched at an angle, my weight upon neither hands nor feet, with no way to support myself. Impossibly, incredibly, suspended.
Hysteria bubbles up, fueled on startled fear. I force my lungs to open, to take one breath and then another. I can not wrench my eyes from the open drop beneath my foot, a drop half of my body hangs over without any means to stay so balanced. Thoughts, disjointed and chaotic, tumble through my head and scramble to find some plausible answer. "gignetai d' ek tês mnêmês empeiria tois anthrôpois 1" a long dead teacher's voice recites but it avails me not at all for if memory provides experience then what memory in all my hundreds of years may explain the unexplainable? Only wish remains constant, the breathless prayer that whatever miracle has occurred it will continue to occur and I shall not find myself plummeting downward.
But the gods are smiling and the only moving thing in the world is the whistling wind and the falling snow.
I wonder, idylly, if I dream. If perhaps I missed the impact itself and now lie, senseless, at the foot of the climb. If so, I reason to myself, then what harm? You are already hurt, the pain shall not strike until you wake, and why not explore the dream while the opportunity is there? Let go. Yet the flesh is unwilling and still I cling, though there is nothing for my hands to cling to but smooth stone that even my fingers may not find purchase upon. It seems the final idiocy of a mind gone scattered to the cutting winds, to release that last grasp upon reality. I start and stop a dozen times, never daring to move more than the muscles in fingertips rapidly going numb.
Finally, taking a deep breath, I let my hands drop.
It is another instant, frozen in the belabored stutter between panicked heartbeats, before nature plucks with insistent hand and I feel the world rush past me with the sickening sensation of falling. There is no time for recrimination, no time for thoughts or curses or action, no time for anything but to close my eyes, brace my unwilling body and scream denial, heart and mind, NO!
Falling and falling and falling - I count two frantic heartbeats, then another, and know that no such span of time should have been allowed between the point of my departure and the base of the climb. I open my eyes, torn between not wishing to see the final moment before impact and wanting to witness the possible new miracle.
I open my eyes to a world gone mad.
Falling, yes, but falling up - the world spiraling below me, smaller by the moment, receding at a ghastly rate into swirls of masking white until up and down have no meaning beneath the shroud of snow. Panic, I find, is such a weak word - paltry and insignificant, to describe the sheer scalding terror burning through me, stealing away thought and breath and ability. I can not remember the last time I gave voice to scream and I have no breath for it now. The wind roars in my ears, painful, pressing hard until I wonder if my gibbering mind shall simply burst. Flailing, trying to find purchase where there is none, the world buffeted around me as I struggle against nothing at all.
The helpless tears freeze upon my lashes, rimming my world in red tinged fury. The air is chiller than any I have ever tasted, burning tongue and lungs, pouring like liquid ice down my throat. The pressure against my ears muffles sound, even as it drives the frantic pulse of my heartbeat deep into my head. Impossible, I chant to myself. Oh surely impossible. Dream, wish, nightmare, fantasy but surely, surely impossible. The prayers fall from my lips like the countless snow flakes from the clouds.
Who has not dreamed of reaching up to touch the clouds? What child has not looked up into the sun drenched sky and tracked the path of billows of white? It is said that the gods strode there, that their home was there, high above the land where mortals toiled. But who, truly, could imagine it? To live there, where the brilliant rolling forms of clouds might replace the curve of green hills. What would one see from there? What would the clouds feel like, what would it be to touch one, to walk its surface?
The answer, I find, is nothing but the realm of nightmare without equal. Darkness, wet and cloying and freezing cold. I gasp, choking, stung by slivers of ice that pierce clothes and rake across skin. There are those who preach a hot punishment, an afterlife filled with flames. No. This... this cold hell is a thousand times worse.
And then it is gone.
The air is still cold, still an assault to the body that breaths it, but it is free of ice. It no longer presses against me like an echo of the chill sea. Shivering, I dare to dash the frozen layers from my eyes, to open them and find what new world I have entered.
My tears are forgotten, my fear startled silent. Starlight, and never, never have I seen so many so clearly. It stretches around me, the dome of heaven, a limitless black cloth strewn with brilliant points of light. I am moving still and the lights spin dizzyingly around me. Stop, I wish. Stop, for if that was hell then this is surely Olympus. This splendor, this sea of heaven and sky with the surface of the clouds glinting below - this is wonder.
And my wishes still have power, for though it is none too steady and my eyes hurt with the motion, my body halts at last to hover, spinning slowly there above the world.
This is what it is to be a god.
Above, the stars move in their eternal dance, and for one moment I wonder if I might not join them - if I might not reach out and touch them as I have touched the clouds. So distant, and yet infinately nearer than before. Below, the light of the moon makes silver of the vast hills and valleys of clouds, shadows cast in silken blackness, highlights picked out in brilliant sharpness. Solid to the eye, as though one might walk upon their surface. No sign, here, of the storm that rages below. Here, all is calm, still and silent. Only the wind speaks. This is the home of birds alone and in the darkness of the night even they are absent. I witness the miracle in solitude and before it I am humbled, brought to my knees by the majesty of that which no man has ever touched.
Awe conquers fear and at length my heart slows somewhat. My ears, I discover, have ceased to ache, the pressure gone. The chill pierces to the bone but it is a slight discomfort in the face of this wonder. Experiment is embarked on with trepidation, but no physical motion makes any difference to my state. The air, then, is not an ocean through which birds swim as fish do the sea. It has no touch, no substance. Thought alone directs my body through its emptiness, held aloft on the wings of wishes. It is graceless and fumbling but it matters not at all. It is enough and more than man's mind has ever imagined.
Wonder and fear, combined, turn my thoughts away from miracles and back to the earth below. My descent is only somewhat more controled then my initial rise. The clouds are still wet, still visciously cold, their exterior beauty lost amidst the blackness of their underside. The heavy pressure is there again, making me press hand to ears, shake my head and hold my breath.
I drop into the flurry of the storm, lost amidst the swirls of white. How far from clouds to ground? The childish fear that there is no ground, that the world itself has dropped away, grips me. I shiver and can not stop, no matter how I try.
The landing tumbles me head over feet, knocking the breath from my body and jarring my very bones and teeth. I hear something crack, feel the flash of pain streak along my leg. I curl around it, gasping, letting the spinning of my head slow until I can look up and around.
The ground is beneath me, the sky above. My hands are buried in drifts of snow and it falls still around me, a direction that is singularly comforting. My body has the same weight, the same range of motion, that it has always had. The dream is gone.
But it was no dream alone, for my leg aches and I bite my lip as I pull the bone back into place, breath hissing through my teeth as I wait for the throbbing pain to cease. Dreams do not break bones. Dreams do not leave a man's lungs seared, or rim his clothes in frosted ice.
Did they know of this, the old ones? Had my solemn queen tread the clouds and walked the paths of the gods? I roll back, look up, blinking into the falling snowflakes. Did you dance among the stars, beauty?
She would not answer, even if I asked. Perhaps she did. Perhaps even now there were old ones up there, somewhere, above the storm, above the land and sea, where the stars shine brighter than any flame.
Perhaps I did dream it. And perchance, some night, I will dream it again.
1) gignetai d' ek tês mnêmês empeiria tois anthrôpois: hai gar pollai mnêmai tou autou pragmatos mias empeirias dunamin apotelousin. -- It is from memory that men acquire experience, because the numerous memories of the same thing eventually produce the effect of a single experience. (Aristotle, Metaphysics) Back