I am whispering through a strange place with an even stranger companion, our feet barely touching the bare leaves before us.  (How can leaves be bare?  He asks here. They just are. I reply) I do not know him but he seems familiar with me.  He walks with an echo of a smile etched across his face.  (Here, in a dream, a smile can echo.)  Have you seen the cliffs?He asks, a light flickering on somewhere beyond his eyes.  (I do not reply.  In this dream I cannot speak).  I feel myself smile, a strange reflex not fully understood by dream me.  He half glances back before taking a wide leading stride.  As dreams often are, I am both completely aware of what will happen next and hopelessly lost in this place.  Shadows crawl across our path, set loose by bushes along the walkway.  The moon is hiding.  (Stars stretch across the sky, but I do not see them yet.  Why are you telling me now then, he asks.)  

My body seems to half swim through the night air.  I have been here before.  Dream me does not know this, but at the same time accepts it completely.  My companion’s shadow shivers down the dark woodcut steps.  I follow.  (It seems it wasn’t me, now I recall.)  He stops at the turn in the staircase.  (Who are you then?)  Dream me and real me seem to combine for a frightening sliver in time here.  I both remember this and see the scene for the first time.  The feeling passes, and I forget.  

Hand in hand we quietly stumble up the small slope of a trail, slippery from the winter’s rain.  I am concerned by this for a moment but, once again, forget.  My free hand slips through the branches of a tree.  As we reach the clearing I both remember and do not understand my hand slips away from my companion.  (Familiarity is a strange thing, I explain.)  In a motion that seems to never end but last only a second I look up at the stars.  These are my stars.  In this moment I am awake in my dream, staring up at the sky I grew up looking towards on summer nights.  I am aware of the memory, of this cluster of seconds at least.  Events before and after blur and become the darkness of the edges that surround the cliff.  Somewhere in the distance the ocean roars into the night.  

(And?  He asks, impatiently straightening the blanket that lays on the bed.  That’s it, I reply, looking away.) 

(The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us from Come On Feel The Illinoise)

I often dream of Sufjan Stevens