stille nacht

Several years ago I stopped dreaming. Or, rather, stopped remembering my dreams.
They were all about the end of the world, or just my world. Everybody dying. Or my family killed off one by one, leaving only me.
Not nightmares. It wasn't these dreams that made dreaming stop. The elements of horror were there: serpents and fangs--skeletons (one a hundred feet tall)--withering trees and skies of blood. And Death--imminent and eminent--Proximate, then present--terrible and immaculate.
But horror didn't bloom from these elements. No flower of fear hushed pale in the moonlight through the window. Rather than taking fright, the soul settled.
Because morning kept coming?
If night became a void, then so did I. Sleep was haunted by Death, then sleep was Death. Not a chill wind, or an icy dagger. More like a blanket. A comfort. A stillness.

* * *

So days became the dream. I floated along--aloof as I could be--through trumped up tragedy and fancy--through events and states of being that seemed imagined. Changeling loyalties, political upheavals, facts becoming myths and vice-versa--all that others called Life and living--these were grotesques, tales.
It was ballet.
It was also chaos.
None of it was real and I knew it. Not just because the wavelength of it missed me, but because it all tasted like plastic compared to the dead quiet.

* * *

Slowly, dreams came back to sleep, haunting the night, here and there, with visions. Mostly desires just out of reach and other useless froth, resembling "Life" all too well.
So Life urged the still out into the light of day--to be reconciled with this morning that keeps coming.
I've seen it written of an endless day to come. And as I find hope in it, I come to love the sunrise as the dawn of my own self, and I try to appreciate it one ribbon at a time.
But the heat and the clamor of Day remind us that morning is only a symbol of the resurrection. Our souls rise later--after passing through ultimate stillness--
Hinted at in dreams.
Serene behind the day's mask of human fear.
Tempting us like only a valley of shadow can.