A dream is like the churning foam when a wave of desire crashes against an unmoving shoreline.
It’s salty and sprays in droplets like a tear. Maybe it’s from laughing so hard.
When the dream is what I want and the shoreline is what I should do, then the dream is sordid and marked with struggle. It will get smudged and threadbare, like an old rag used for cleaning. The dreamer will wear that rag as though it is a regal garment. It’s a good match for the crown of thorns. Or the dreamer will eventually toss it away, and run naked through the streets, parading sin like Lady Godiva. Maybe that will be a good thing. Or maybe it will result in donning a new hair shirt.
I hate dreams like that.
The best dreams are when the wave of desire crashes against the impossible rocks where the sirens sing. The sadness in these dreams is a kind of ecstasy, and the joy in them is a radiant blackness. These dreamers change the world with the desperate thrill of their discontent.
Nothing was ever achieved through contentment.
Trees that are green are content. Trees that are blue drank discontent from the rocks, poisoned themselves with power. Drugged, they began dreaming.
When I was a tree, I was given a dream. It was a flat dream, fibrous, a rectangle fashioned in a four-to-one ratio, concealed in a folded form. Chemical patterns were traced upon it. It was hung by a thread made from synthesized organics onto the bowing arch of my lowest branch.
The second sun left that dream. It was a dream with a face. The locus of the sensory organs was described very precisely, as were its long, sensitive grasping appendages, its awkward, loping gait, the tenor of the vibrations used for its communications. It was clearly a pollinator, the subsidiary type, not the superior child-bearers. I and I was doubly-grateful. It was easier to be subsidiary. Also, the feeding-glands seemed awkward – inefficient to support when so rarely used. Mammals are badly designed.
Maybe I need to be more clear about this. When I say precisely described, I don’t mean through what I later – when I could see and was capable of reading – understood to be the writing in the letter. I mean that the impression of the dream was as crisp and forceful as the waves against the rocks at the foot of Starbright Mountain below the I which would become I and I which would become all of us.
A tree dreams of flowers. A tree dreams of fruit. These dreams are like the reflections on a deep, still lake. Then a pebble is thrown. The dreams ripple. There’s something else. A boy and a girl walking hand in hand. She’s eating an ice cream. There’s nothing like ice cream on this world. Mammals aren’t native. The mammals brought it with them, their dreams, their ice cream. She reaches over and taps the boy on the nose with the ice cream. He laughs and wipes it away with the back of his hand. She pouts. “I would’ve licked it off,” she says.
It’s impossible to be a tree after that.
This girl – the second sun – will achieve much, because she is never content. Her dreams are enormous and impossible. Only a big tree could become those dreams. A tree that could hold up the entire sky.
When I was emanated, it came as a shock to us to realize how small most dreams are. We had only ever known Tara’s dreams. Most people want a new hovercar. A farm. A surprise birthday party. Popularity. A pony.
The joke is that it’s never what they want, really. They don’t know how to read the symbols. Tara knows how to read the symbols. “I want a unicorn,” she said, knowing she didn’t want a unicorn at all.
She got a moth-tree-angel. She got twenty-five husbands. She got a god.
“It’s important to keep a sense of humor about things,” she said when cleaning out her uncle’s palace. I’m sure she knew the truth – that Patrick was responsible for his death, the death of her last living relative, the one she couldn’t afford to let live, but didn’t have the heart to order his death. She never mentioned it, simply sifted through the tasteless bric-a-brac which had been in her family for centuries. There was an enormous gilt statue of a unicorn. “I’m keeping it,” she said. “It’s horrible, I know, but my ancestors brought it from Earth.” She smiled, and there was a wicked humor in it. “I’ll give it to Patrick. It will appall him.”
It was hot, too hot on Sideria. She was eating an ice cream which was melting faster than she could consume it, running down her hand, dripping onto the exposed skin of her chest, down into the space between her inconvenient but attractive mammary glands.
“Can I lick it off?” I asked.