Eye of the Dreamer

Prologue

..............I saw her again in the dream. 

In the utter loneliness of the mind...stretching out boundlessly ... the thought of her at last marks a horizon...  

............. I focus all my longing there .... 

In waking existence ..... I despair and curse the bleakness ......... how long ..... how long must I wait? 

.............My consolation is the dream. 

Now.... I can feel her presence... in the far far away I imagine..... her soft touch... isolation breached... 

............Only in the dream. 

Will the dream emerge into waking?... 

............. Our bodies meeting? 

Or existence become the dream?....  

..............The soul's desire? 

Is she real?  

Or..  

Am I? 

I only know... I see her coming...  

Closer... 

....In the dream.

Part I To Sleep Perchance To Dream

1 

"Oh Crap!" 

The words shot through the silence of the early morning, stopping the train of felines always following in Delan's wake. They froze mid step watching wide eyed for the cause of the sudden outburst and upon whom or what the wrath of their mistress would descend. "Oh no, oh no, oh no!" Delan's voice wound up to a crying moan. Her dogs came running in to help at the sound of her distress. However they only succeeded in creating a chaos of cat bodies. They scattered instantly; some scrabbling for the exits, others leaping for high refuge to arch and hiss... and one small guilty kitten diving for safety under a chair.  

In the semi dark of her living room Delan stood staring down at the small stool beside the sofa. Her laptop glowed with a screen full of gibberish... x's and backslashes, endless lines of e's and s's marched across pages and pages of what had been four thousand hard-to-come-by words for the creative writing assignment due today!  

She had only set it aside for a few minutes to give her dogs an early morning run and returned to find the tiny miscreant creating its own opus of "kitten on the keys". To add insult to injury it had sat on the backspace key long enough to obliterate all of her text. There was no hope for it. ...Delan tried "undo" and all of the other computer tricks she knew but there was no way to retrieve her lost work.  

RATS... if only I had saved, she thought. But she knew that the composition had not been her best effort. The descriptions felt clunky and she was unhappy with her characters. They had bored her so much she was secretly glad they had all died in a blizzard of nonsense. They deserved it. But, it still didn't solve her problem. Sighing, she wrapped herself in her favorite fuzzy blanket once more and rearranged the pillows to support her laptop.  

"Hmmmm..."Delan tried to clear her mind as she deleted the "cat"-astrophy and brought up a new document. Catching sight of the round-eyed little face peering out from under the chair, she smiled. "You did me a favor my little would-be Shakespeare," she said softly, "even if it doesn't feel like it right now."  

Despite her best efforts to begin again, Delan's eyes slowly drifted downward as she relaxed. It was too early to write coherently anyway she thought. Leaning back, she let herself fall asleep.