Dialogues Vol. 1: The Stuff of Dreams

“Do dogs dream?”

“Sure they do. See how their legs twitch when they sleep?”

“That doesn’t really tell us anything.”

“I’ve seen a sleeping dog run into a wall. You know what?”

“Hmm?”

“Why do you think it is that animals dream?”

“Assuming they do dream. Probably for the same reasons people do, which isn’t really saying very much.”

“True enough, but think about it. The habits of people are learned. They are passed on via channels of social constructs. Family, peers, self preseverance.”

“So?”

“Animals are different! Pure instinct propels them from the womb, yolk, and what not. What is the stuff of instinct? What incorporates it into the animal’s brain?”

“Beats me. It’s one of these things we’ll never figure out.”

“Well, I propose that dreams are encoders in which DNA programs the organism with aggregate behaviors learned in the species’ lineage, triggered by the various hormones that occur within each development phase…”

“Sounds a bit far-fetched, man.”

“It’s not something that should be easily dismissed. You see—”

CRASH!

“—oh, shit, did you see that?”

“That dang dog just up and ran into the wall! Well, I’ll grant you that; maybe dogs do dream.”

Remnants of a Kansas City Ice Storm

The fresh sunrise is the size of a half dollar held close to the face. It ignites the ice-encrusted world and petals into cold flame the frail blooms of an early spring. The ice is death, but amid the veins of light that web skyward it suggets a life of its own. I am tired but it invigorates me and I wonder if I am glowing as well. In a contest between age and youth, the dogs play in the still morning, their breath visible. I imagine their barks are cacophanous. Perhaps they are just opening and closing their mouths in a silent parody of conversation. The crunch underfoot is delicious and I laugh as they pound their paws in the snow towards the hearth warmth of the house.

The White Red Chiaroscuro

A stranger approaches you one night. Perhaps you are alone under the only lighted lamp in a shadowy streetcorner, or it is an empty bus you ride, sullen in your seat and feeling the late hour. The stranger approaches you with bead black eyes and a voice like yellowed parchment paper rasping against dead skin, and submits a choice in the flickering light of street or bus, of knowing the exact circumstances and instant of your death, or an eternity approaching others with the exact same proposal.

You chuckle at the strange turn of events and choose eternity. His bone white face crinkles into a rictus that is, you realize with growing horror, a smile. It is a slash that expels a hot carcass wind and sprouts a jagged range of yellowred fangs filling your vision like some poison portrait of Transylvania. Suddenly that corpse breath is digging at your neck, and you can’t but marvel at the utter corniness of the beast’s next words: You shall live forever in the hearts and minds of your loved ones! You manage to squeeze off a b-b-but I have nothing, nobody! just before your cartoid spurts arterially. A spark of irritation, in your dying mind, conflagrates into a full-out bloom of fury as you behold your very last impression of life, a grinning white red chiaroscuro.

In the white hot incandescence of anger, your thing we call soul like moth to streetlight, away from death  hanging on to that lashing frail thread of vengeance’s lust, back, back, back, your life unspooling to a connate snap where a white cold glare brutally greets you with a hand slap to the backside, heckuva set of lungs this one’s got! You progress through the various stages of human development in a tense anger, the cloud of premonition hanging over your head. You wonder where all this repressed rage comes from, and your high school psychologist keeps on saying you keep it bottled up until you’re forced to find something to bottle him up. One day you slide into a vacant bus, or stride into the littered halo of a lone streetlight. You choose to know the exact instant and circumstances of your death, and he tears out your throat on the spot.

Round round round the merry-go-round you go, the wet warm splashing to a halt with a connate slap in cold fluorescent glare and laughter at baby you boiling with pure pissed off and you grow up kicking at dogs and breaking windows, become took with carrying a pair of pliers about without really knowing why and one night you step into a bus, or you find yourself loitering an empty streetcorner. You fly at the pale thing with the rat eyes and bad teeth, you know this how, without even looking at these poison lips, on pure instinct and sheer reflex, and there is screaming. This time around, it is not you that screams.

Well, mostly not you.