This is the dream I love the best. I had it once. I’ve tried to make it come back, but it does not. Two wolves are running. That is all. They run by moonlight across an open hillside and then into an oak forest. There is little underbrush and they do not slow. They are not even hunting. They are just running, taking joy in the stretch of their muscles and the cool air flowing into their open jaws. They owe nothing to no one. They have no decisions, no duties, and no king. They have the night and the running, and it is enough for them. I long to be that complete.
This is the dream from the end of my time. I have dreamed it six different ways, but I will only write what always stays the same. There is a wolf as big as a horse. He is black and stands still as stone and stares. My father is as gray as dust, and old, so old. “I’m just so tired,” he says in two of the dreams. In three he says, “I’m sorry, Bee.” In one of the dreams, he says nothing at all, but his silence means everything. I would like to stop having this dream. It feels so strong, as if it must happen, no matter the path I choose. Every time I wake from it, it feels as if I have taken a step closer to a cold and dangerous place.
A dream from a winter night when I was six years old. In a market square, a blind beggar sat in his rags. No one was giving him anything, for he was more frightening than pathetic with his cruelly scarred face and crumpled hands. He took a little puppet out of his ragged clothes; it was made of sticks and string with only an acorn for a head, but he made it dance as if it were alive. A small sullen boy watched from the crowd. Slowly he was drawn forward to watch the puppet’s dance. When he was close, the beggar turned his clouded eyes on the boy. They began to clear, like silt settling to the bottom of a puddle. Suddenly the beggar dropped his puppet. This dream ends in blood and I am afraid to recall it. Does the boy become the puppet, with strings attached to his hands and feet, his knees and elbows and bobbing head? Or does the beggar seize the boy with hard and bony hands? Perhaps both things happen. It all ends in blood and screaming. It is the dream I hate most of all the dreams I have ever had. It is the end dream for me. Or perhaps the beginning dream. I know that after this event, the world as I know it is never the same.
Then, from the gleaming mists that surrounded us, there burst a wolf, all black and silver. He was covered in scars and death clung to him like water clings to a dog’s coat after he has plunged through a river. My father was with him and in him and around him, and never had I realized him as he was. He bled from dozens of unhealable wounds and yet at the core of him, life burned like molten gold in a furnace.
This is the dream of the flame horses. It is a winter evening. It’s not night but it’s dark. An early moon is rising over the birch trees. I hear a sad song with no words, and it is like a wind in the trees. It keens and moans. Then the stables burst into flames. Horses scream. And then two horses race out. They are on fire. One is black and one is white, and the flames are orange and red, whipped by the wind of the horses’ own passage. They race out into the night. The black one falls suddenly. The white one races on. Then suddenly the moon opens its mouth and swallows the white horse. This dream makes no sense to me and no matter how I try, I cannot draw a picture for it. So this dream is recorded only in words.
The dream begins with a distant bell tolling. In this dream, I am myself. I am trying to run away from something, but I can only run in a circle. I rush as fast as I can, trying to run away, but always I find I am running directly back to the most dangerous place. When I tumble too close, they reach out and catch me. I do not see who they are. Only that they capture me. There is a staircase of black stone. She puts on a glove, slipping her hand into his anguish. She opens the door to the staircase, and grips me by the wrist as she drags me down. The door slams shut behind us, soundlessly. We are in a place where the emptiness is actually made of other people. They all begin speaking to me at once, but I plug my ears and close my eyes.
In this dream, everything stank. I was in a terrible place. Animals walked about without their skins. They looked like the hanging deer in the cooling sheds, after the carcasses had bled and when the hunters stripped the hides from the meat. I do not know how I knew that, for I had never seen hunters ride to the hunt, nor deer hung to bleed before skinning. The animals were dark red and purple and pink with glistening white muscles. The worst was around their staring eyes. They could not blink. In the streets the men and women were wearing the animals’ skins. It was so clearly wrong and yet all the folk there in Wortletree thought it the most normal thing in the world. I did not want to be there. On the water, a great seabird with broad white wings called for us to hurry. They made me go.
I dreamed I was a nut. I had a very hard shell and I was curled up inside it. Inside my shell, I was me and there I kept all the parts of me. I had been swept into a river, and it tried to carry me with it but I stayed in one place and refused it. Curious to say, I abruptly fell out of the river. I fell onto green grass and it was spring all around me. For a time, I stayed tight inside my shell. Then I unfolded myself and I was all there, in one piece. The others who had been carried by the river were not so fortunate. This is a dream that feels truer than most. It is a thing that almost certainly will happen. I do not understand how it can happen, that I shall become a nut and be swept away in the river. But I know it is so. And the mouth of the river looked like the shape I draw below. And the river sprang out of a black stone.
Wide gape the gates of yellowed bone. A tongue of plank is our path between the teeth as we walk toward the gullet. Here I will be devoured. This is a true thing, near unavoidable on any path. I must enter those jaws.
In this dream, I am very small and I am hiding inside a tiny case, like a nut in a shell. I am floating in a wild and raging river. I am very frightened because I fear this journey has no end. Around me there are others who are flowing with the river. It seems I could come out of my shell and melt and be part of them. Then a dragon picks me up. He holds me tight in his paw so that even if I wanted to come out of my shell and melt, I could not. I am scared, and then he lets me feel that I am very, very safe. “As the wolf did for my young, so I will do for his cub. I will protect you here. When you emerge, come to me. I will protect you.” I draw here the dragon. He is a terrifying creature, but to me he is a kindly uncle.
This was a very short dream. A chalk-faced man dressed in robes of green trimmed with gold walked on a beach. A grotesque creature hunched on a grassy outcrop above the beach and watched him, but the man paid it no mind. He was carrying fine chains, as if to be worn as jewelry, but much stronger. He carried them in loops on his arm. He came to a place where the sand was shaking and bulging. He watched it, smiling. Snakes began to come out of the earth. They were large snakes, as long as my arm. They were wet and their skins were bright shades of blue and red and green and yellow. The man put a looped chain around the head of a blue one, and the chain became a noose. He lifted the snake clear of the ground. It thrashed but it could not get away even though it opened wide its mouth and showed white teeth, very pointed. The pale man caught another snake in his snare, a yellow one. Next, he tried to catch a red one, but it shook free of him and slithered away very fast toward the sea. “I will have you!” the man shouted, and he chased the snake and stepped on the end of its tail, trapping it near the waves’ edge. He held the leashes of his two captive snakes in one hand and in the other he shook out a fresh snare for the red snake. He thought she would turn and dart her head at him and he would loop the chain around her neck. But it was a dragon who turned on him, for he was treading on a dragon’s tail. “No,” she said to him very loudly. “But I will have you.” The picture I have painted for this dream is not very good, for my father’s red ink does not gleam and glisten as the snake did.
A snake is in a stone bowl. There is soup around it. It smells bad and then I know it is not soup. It is very dirty water, full of snake piss and waste. A creature comes to the bowl and suddenly I see how big the snake is and the bowl. The snake is many times longer than the creature is tall. The creature reaches through bars around the bowl to scoop up some of the dirty water. He slurps some of the filthy water and smiles with an ugly wide mouth. I do not like to look at him, he is so wrong. The serpent coils in on itself and tries to bite him. He laughs and shuffles away.
A dream so brief but so brilliantly colored that I cannot forget it. Is it significant? My father is talking to a person with two heads. They are so deep in conversation that no matter how loudly I interrupt them, they will not speak to me. In the dream I say, “Find her. Find her. It’s not too late!” In the dream I am a wolf made of fog. I howl and howl, but they do not turn to me.
This dream was like a painting that moved. The light was dim, as if pale-gray or blue paint had been washed over all. Beautiful streamers in brilliant colors moved in a slow breeze that came and went, came and went, so that the streamers rose and fell. They were shimmering pennants of gold and silver, scarlet, azure, and viridian. Bright patterns like diamonds or eyes and twining spirals ran the length of each pennant. In my dream I moved closer, flowing effortlessly toward them. There was no sound and no feel of wind on my face. Then my perspective shifted. I saw huge snake heads, blunt-nosed, with eyes as large as melons. I came closer and closer, although I did not wish to, and finally I could see the faint gleam of a net that held all those creatures as fish are caught in a gill net. The lines of the net were nearly transparent and somehow I knew that they had all rushed into the net at the same moment, to be trapped and drowned there. This dream had the certainty of a thing that had happened, and not just once. It would happen again and again. I could not stop it for it was already done. Yet I also knew it would happen again.
This is my most frightening dream. I dream it as a vine that splits into two branches. On one branch there are four candles growing. One by one they are kindled to flame, but their light does not illuminate. Instead a crow says, “Here are four candles to light you to bed. Four candles lit means their child is dead. Four candles burn for the end of their ways. The Wolf and the Jester have wasted their days.” Then, on the other branch of the vine, three candles are suddenly kindled. Their light is almost blinding. And the same crow says, “Three flames burn brighter than the sun. Their blaze engulfs an evil done. Their angry mourning purpose gives. They do not know their child still lives.” Then the crow suddenly has a broken candle. She drops it and I catch it. In a slow and frightening voice she says, “Child, light the fire. Burn the future and the past. It’s what you were born to do.” I woke up shaking all over and I got out of bed and ran to my parents’ chamber. I wanted to sleep with them, but instead my mother brought me back to my bed and lay down beside me. She sang me a song until I could fall asleep again. I was very young when I dreamed this; I had only recently learned how to climb out of my bed. But I have never forgotten the dream or the crow’s rhyme. I draw the candle as he held it, broken and the pieces held together only by the wick in the middle.
I am so bothered when the dreams make no sense, but still swell with importance. It is hard to write down a story that has no sequence or sense, let alone make a picture of what my dream showed me. But here it is. A flaming man offers a drink to my father. He drinks it. He shakes himself like a wet dog, and pieces of wood fly in all directions. He turns into two dragons that fly away. I am almost certain that this dream will come to pass. A dream that makes no sense!
The puppet dances. He turns flips and he jigs. His painted red smile looks happy but he is screaming, for he performs on red-hot coals. His wooden feet begin to smoke. A man comes in with a shining axe. He swings it. I think he will cut off the puppet’s burning feet, but instead the axe cuts all his strings. But the man with the axe falls just as swiftly as the puppet leaps away, free.
Wasps sting when their nest is threatened. I went to fetch a clay flowerpot for my mother. I took one from the top of the stack, not knowing that wasps had built a nest between it and the one below. They rushed out in a horde and chased me as I fled. They stung me over and over and the pain was like fire eating into my flesh. They are not like bees, who must weigh an attack against their own lives. Wasps are more like men, able to kill again and again, and still go on living. My cheek and neck were swollen, and my hand was a shapeless lump with sausage fingers. My mother put the sap of ferns and cool mud on the stings. And then took oil and a flame and killed them all, burning their nest and their unhatched children in vengeance for what they had done to her daughter. This was before I could speak clearly. I was astonished at her hatred of them; truly I had not known my mother capable of such cold anger. When I stared at her, as the nest burned, she nodded to me. “While I live, no one shall hurt you and go unpunished for it.” I knew then I must be careful of what I told her about the other children. My father may once have been an assassin. My mother remained one.
This dream does not belong here. It isn’t an important dream, except to me. I only write it down here because I want to keep it forever, for myself. In the dream, I am working in the herb garden with my mother. The sky is blue and the sun is out, but it is early in the day, so it is pleasantly warm, not hot. We crawl along the rows on each side of her lavender beds. She has strong hands. When she grips a weed and pulls, it comes up with a long white root. I am trying to help her weed, but I am just pulling off the top leaves. She stops me and gives me a little trowel. “It is worse than useless to do things halfway, Bee. For then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.” Then she showed me how to push the trowel into the earth and pop up the weed I was not strong enough to pull. I woke up with the sound of her voice in my ears. It was so real, but the peculiar part is that even though it was exactly something my mother would say to me, I have no memory of such a day. I have drawn here my mother’s hands, strong and brown, as she draws the weed from the earth, root and all.
A big scale, like the money-changer at Oaksbywater has. On one pan a bee alights, and the pan is suddenly weighed all the way down. A very old woman, her face impassive, asks, “What is the value of this life? What is a fair measure to buy it?” A blue buck comes charging across the market. It leaps and lands in the empty pan. The bee’s pan rises and they balance exactly. The very old woman nods and smiles. Her teeth are red and pointed.
I am Bee and Bee is me. My mother knew this from the beginning. Sometimes, at the beginning of a dream, I see myself. I am a bee, gold and black, shining like sparks and charcoal. As I fly, my colors grow brighter and brighter, as does an ember when one blows on it. I am so bright I illumine places that are dark, and in those places I see the important dreams.
I mourn the good paper and lovely leather covers of the books my father gave to me. They are gone, sent to the bottom with all the goods and possessions of those who captained and crewed Paragon. I do not miss the writing on those pages. The journal was written by a child whom I barely recall. The dreams she wrote are irrelevant, markers on paths that no longer exist. The few that yet may be will come to pass with or without ink on a page. New dreams now come to me, and Beloved urges me to write them down. I do not like to call him Beloved. And when I called him Fool once he flinched and the captain of this ship looked at me as if I were rude. Before others, I call him Teacher. He does not seem to mind. I will not name him Amber. I no longer have a book, but Beloved has given me sheets of paper and a simple pen and black ink. I think he has begged these things from Captain Wintrow. This is my first dream to record. An old tree blossoms and bears a single beautiful fruit. It falls to the ground and rolls away. It cracks open and a woman wearing a silver crown steps out of it. I am sad that I must draw this only in black on white paper. He has told me that he will read the dreams I write. That he must so that he can guide me. I write here what I have already told him, that he may read it again. I will not let my dreams be used to shape the world. And regardless of what he promised my father, I find it intrusive and rude that he reads my words here.
A gray man is singing in the wind. He is as gray as storm clouds, as gray as rain on a windowpane. He is smiling as the wind blows past him. His hair and his cloak stream in the wind and tatter away. He tatters with them, until only his song is left. I woke from the dream smiling. It is a promise, and a good one. It will happen
There is a cage made of crawling, squirming things. Inside is something that used to be a man. A black-and-white rat looks at him, and then giggles and turns handsprings as it abandons him. I make no illustration for this dream. It felt as if it would be true, and I would witness it.
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