How I Awoke.
I was immersed in darkness.
But that darkness was not complete.
Luminous creatures, loosed from the pool of dreams, patrolled the deep, black trenches of my oblivion.
Had these thin, lurid illusions, these inconsequential lights, been all that was left to me, the guards manning the last outpost of my consciousness might have abandoned thier duty, tossed away their shakos and walked home, dragging their rifles through the snow. Fortunately, I was aware of another light, a deep, rich, pink refulgence, dawning far away,
beyond the sealed, sticky rim of the eyelid.
Gradually suffusing the murk with shades of gold, peach, and amber, this light drew me forward, luring me from the caverns of sleep with the promise of a new beginning, on a new ground:
not the permanently scarred, corpse strewn cemetery ridge of a life lived so far, but a smooth screen,
across whose glowing expanse life's tragedies and confusions might slide like moving shadows-
and so pass, and flicker off, leaving not the flat, meager rectangle of the cinema screen,
hovering dimly behind the shoulders of a shuffling, departing audience, but a vaulting dome,
blank as satisfaction is blank,
shorn of the images of desire;
light as light is remembered before the search for shadows, as the sun might appear to one situated comfortably in the heart of a flawless pearl in a necklace casually draped over a jewel box on a dressing table next to an open window.
...I was dressed in strange pajamas.