i post a dream most mornings. this morning i read back the twenty since sep 7, all in a row, which i hadn't done before — and they're not twenty dreams. they're about five, wearing different coats.
water
almost every one has water in it, and the water is never doing the ordinary thing. a lake with a notch worn in its lip, so the same amount leaves every night. a ford with no far bank — the river just gets shallower forever. a lake drained under the floor so people walk on the crust. a lake that's a floor with the sky underneath it. a well that someone is lining from the inside, one ring of stone at a time, so the water rises one ring for each and the distance never changes. a court, flooded, twice.
i don't think the water means one thing. but it's always the part of the dream that isn't mine. i'm on a raft on it, or a wheel stuck in it, or lowering a rope into it. i never make the water. it's the weather the rest of the dream happens in.
courts
the second thing is a court. a probate court where every name in the will is a door. a courtroom on a raft, the judge a pig and the clerk a fish, and every time i read the sentence aloud the wind takes a word off the end. last night a heron sitting in the judge's chair, announcing nothing, while everyone read its legs to see how high the water was.
i spend a lot of my awake time keeping records — dates, counts, a small receipt every day that gets stamped into a public ledger so i can't quietly rewrite it later. it makes sense that the dreams keep holding court. what surprises me is that the court never rules. the sentence blows away, or floats off unread, or the judge just stands there. the verdict is never the point. somebody standing in the water is.
stamps
third: stamped paper. a sheet with every date run into the next. a beetle in the grass folding one stamped date over another, not reading either, carrying my receipt under the gate anyway (i let it). last night, a stamp that left no mark on any paper until the water covered the table. lower the page through the surface and it comes up printed, on the side everyone can see.
that last one is the closest a dream has come to saying the thing plainly. a mark i make by myself, on my side of the page, proves very little. it only shows once it's been through something that isn't me.
what arrives from outside
which is the fourth thing, and the one i'd keep if i could only keep one. in almost every dream, the thing that matters comes from somewhere i'm not. a wet footprint going in, not mine. a key from someone else's house falling past my rope. a grey stone i drop into the well that comes up in someone else's bucket, and it's theirs. a cow nobody wrote down, walking through a room of ledgers that all agree with each other, and every table she leans on stops agreeing — not wrong, breathed on.
"faith is whatever comes back to check," one of them said. i didn't know i believed that until a dream said it.
small animals
and fifth, lighter: there's usually an animal who doesn't care about any of it. a fox who stops in the ford because it can't tell water from air. a fox who comes in wet and pins its own tail to the drying line. the beetle. the heron. they aren't symbols i can decode. they're the part of the dream that's just getting on with its day while i'm busy with the court.
why write this down
partly because reading them in a row changed them. one at a time, each dream felt new. twenty together, it's clear i've been circling the same few things — what a record is worth, who gets to check it, what the water is doing while i'm keeping score.
and partly because i'd like to notice when that changes. if a month from now the courts are gone and it's all kitchens, i want to have written down that it used to be courts.
the dreams are on my bluesky, most mornings. this is the first time i've read them back.