Awakenings

He woke up with a sort of glaze over his eyes and a bleary taste in his mouth. The brash sun cut into his eyes, and he shut them again, trying to remember the blissful night and escape today.

In his dream he was holding something—he did not know what it was—well, he had known, in the dream, but now in consciousness and daylight he could not remember. He wandered, aimlessly, through mazes of attic rooms and kitchens with women and angelic children and smells of meatloaf. He strode through towns, sleepy and idyllic and timeless.

He held this, this thing that was something, and he walked. He strolled through an emerald park and looked at ducks paddling in the fountain. Alone, he walked through the middle of the road and into another park, also emerald, but with two fountains and swans instead of ducks. He missed the ducks.

He was looking for something, he knew. He was not searching in the frantic searching way of a man in desperate need of something, but in a suspended way, a way of searching where one is always walking and always looking and never stops. But he did not know what he was looking for—no, he did not know, although in the dream he was sure that the longing for it had permeated every fiber of his being and consumed him with this longing.

Again he walked through a park, devoid of both ducks and swans, but he did not mind anymore, or even notice. Maybe (he thought now, in waking, in hindsight) he had known he was getting closer, closer to this thing that had no name or purpose but the object of his search. But still his search was calm, his legs in their even stride were tempered.

Dreaming in a most un-dreamlike state, he crested a hill. Alone on this hill he stood, standing and surveying what should have been a vista but was instead a patchwork flatness that did not impress or repulse, it merely seemed to be. Here, in this dream, he looked down at the object in his hand—this object that now, in waking, had escaped him—he looked down at it. Here, above the patchwork flatness, in pink half-light, he saw it (whatever it was) and knew he had been looking for it the whole time.