Visions and Reveries

Siegfried's Dream- Part I

The sleep of the dead is seldom easy.

In your daytime slumber, hidden from the rays of the sun, you dream. In your reverie, you stand in the shifting sands of a vast desert, lit by the crescent moon. In the moon is a beautiful woman, with white skin and shimmering night-black hair. She reaches into the dunes below and plucks a cracked and dirty bottle from the earth. She smiles as she whispers to it and gently places a scroll inside. The woman in the moon gives the bottle to an ugly, hairless cat that stares at you, a single lantern-like eye shining from a shifting and changing face. It passes a workman laying bricks of gold, a half-built pyramid that he walks up, layer by layer. Beside him a mason stands, dressed in long robes, holding a rule and compass. He leans on a staff with a twining snake around it. The snake whispers, flicking venom into the master mason’s ear. Listening intently to the words, the mason plucks a scarab from the ground and flings it toward the horizon behind you, where it settles as though on a windowsill. It scrabbles out of sight then returns, tugging something along with it. Before you know it the night sky begins to lighten, revealing a city fashioned entirely of glass, shining in the blinding, burning brilliance of the golden dawn…