Riddles in the Dark

A riddle I made up.

Standing up straight it chooses to sleep
But when it goes down feel free to creep
For when it wakes it starts to fall
Waving happily to you and all

But do not touch it while awake
For your thirst it will not slake
And if it dances for too long
It will die, its smile is gone.

Cocoon

Some prose I just wrote the during the first 20 minutes of waking up. It was fun!

I just woke with a start! One scary dream - a nightmare of sorts. I will try to resculpt it with the slippery pieces as best I can(now of course you know that dreams are slippery - because as soon as you stop having them they slide away, and the most intimate details which you have been cradling as to recount most clearly seem to be the first to escape)

In this dream, I was tired. You see it makes perfect sense. A quite deceptive dream, as far as realism goes, because my friend - I am tired. My dream mirrored my state of being tired quite well, in fact, as I am both sleepy and exhausted. And by complete disregard for simple decency It(as I may prefer to call my dream) had the audacity to blatantly mock yet smoothly mimic that very state of being!

Of a truth, It being quite deceptive, chose my very location as the birthing place of this farce - for as I woke for the first time in my Dream (as it is, singularly, THE Dream) it was as if waking with clear eyes in the library, yes indeed the very chair, where I had just closed my eyes!

With the stage bewitchingly set, the dream started me about similar duties that drove my eyes closed in the first place - Studies. Studies of all things, to dream about studies! To be well informed, which is exactly what I need you to be, of course you must know that I am preparing for an exam, in fact two chemistry exams, which are to be dispensed at the beginning of next week. What a perfect opportunity for the birth of a dream, when the mind from which it is born is anxious for activity and not repetition. How sly and brilliant of a dream then, to enthrall it's maker through a near perfect simulation of current real life! Same mode of action, same reason for action, same location of action!

Of course to be realistic I began to nod away in that realm too. Fortunately (for both of us, it seems), It quickly decided to remove that from my current course of action (as it may have indeed succeeded in killing itself, had I shut my eyes during its masquerade) to more alluring activities.

Friends were here in the library (which had mysteriously changed from five easily accessible floors to seven - but in all honesty in a dream this is perhaps the smallest noticeable change to reality that one of us who are visitors to that world can usually pick up - and almost always after the fact), and I had a mind to play. Up and down the elevator, up and down the stairs, almost a game of tag.

As the day passed on I began to realize my desire to sleep. I would be moving around the library, chatting with some friends while looking for others, and I would enter into that stage of sleep where you are semi-conscious of the outside world but seem to have no physical capacity to do anything about it unless you force yourself awake.

And then... the Dream's mistake. I could recall that earlier today I had been studying and that I had also fallen asleep. I knew it to be later than five-thirty, as it was about five o'clock when I had last checked the face on a time piece before napping. And... I recalled my work schedule - and panic pressed into my chest. Today, I was to be at work, so I recalled, from two until seven o'clock. I had once been fooled into missing a day of work already in the last six months (by the very place of employment, I submit by the way, with boldness), and to do it again and especially if it were of my own fault would be wrenching to all I believe in. I had been taught that punctuality was tantamount to respect, when dealing with people, and that to not show up was as to spit in their face, while tracking mud onto their recently washed, white, double layered plush carpet and then making a bee line to their china cabinet so that you can use their nicest bowls for eating cereal with the intention of slurping the left over milk while sitting on their dead grandmothers coffin!! (Which has been conveniently placed in their living room [and yes, that should be said in one breath!])

This truly was It's downfall for you see I believed, while I was writhing on the floor trying to see my friends, and attempting to communicate with them (This does happen, by the way, in real life if I am quite exhausted), that it was THURSDAY. I did in fact work from two to seven on Thursday, but today is Friday, not Thursday. In what would have seemed such a small twist in the strange world of Dream (Not my Dream, specifically, but as Earth is Earth do I mean the world of Dream). In that strange place it is not odd at all to find one's feet leaving the loose ground so as to fly with the birds, or the pterodactyls, or the dragons, which pose no supernatural feel to that realm. Then of course, how would It have known to make sure it placed my dreamed day on a different day besides Thursday (of course, my Dream used even this tool to make my dream more realistic as some players who were here 'today' would be gone 'tomorrow' - which tomorrow is actually today, and today is exactly yesterday). Such a small twist, which sent me into a frenzy to wake so that I may ease the anger of my employers, sent that world into oblivion. Such a well crafted deceit, defeated by its own weaving web of continuously concocted cords - which by design were meant to consume my mind in the cocoon of It's world.

And the rest of the pieces? ... have all but slipped away."