Fireman of a Controlled Burn (rec)
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Everything is blue.
I’m in a library—vast and orderly, the air hushed the way it only ever is in places where knowledge sleeps upright. Wherever I go, I’m required to vacuum fire. Real fire. It licks at the edges of shelves and corridors, not wild, but persistent.
The vacuum is enormous—industrial, heavy metal. I don’t carry it; I drive it, steering it like a truck through the stacks. The machine roars and pulls the flames inward, swallowing heat so the building doesn’t burn. This feels necessary. Routine, even. I know how to do it.
Everywhere I look, there are donkeys. Herds of them. They stand calmly, watching. Some of them wear zebra stripes, as though their hides have been rewritten, their identities partially exchanged for pattern.
The dream shifts.
I’m spending freely now. I’m buying black-and-white prints of galaxies and stars—spirals, dust clouds, distant light. Not a few, but truckloads. Stack after stack. As if I need as much of the universe as can be flattened, copied, and carried away.
There’s no panic. Only motion. Task. Accumulation.
Notes on a Dream
When I woke, the images stayed with me in a way dreams rarely do—not as a story, but as a system.
The setting matters. A library is not a place of chaos; it’s where things are stored, ordered, preserved. Knowledge doesn’t live there to be used recklessly—it waits. The fact that everything was blue tells me I wasn’t in a neutral mental space. Blue is depth. Calm with weight in it. A devotional quiet. I was inside thought, not emotion’s eruption, but emotion’s containment.
The task in the dream was strange but specific: I had to vacuum fire. Not extinguish it, not flee from it—manage it. Fire is energy, desire, urgency. It’s also dangerous if left unattended. The vacuum wasn’t light or delicate; it was industrial, heavy, something that required effort and control. I wasn’t carrying it—I was driving it. That suggests scale. Whatever the fire represents in me, it isn’t small, and it isn’t going away. My role, at least in this moment of life, seems to be stewardship rather than release.
What struck me most was that this didn’t feel frantic. It felt routine. Like something I’ve been doing for a long time.
The donkeys complicate the picture. Donkeys are patient animals. They carry burdens without drama. They endure. Seeing them in herds felt like a commentary on repetition—on long, steady labor rather than a single heroic act. The zebra stripes on some of them felt important too: black and white imposed on something naturally neither. As if simplicity had been overlaid with pattern. As if endurance had been asked to perform identity.
Then the dream pivoted, and I was buying images of the universe—galaxies, stars, deep space—but only in black and white. I wasn’t experiencing vastness; I was acquiring representations of it. Truckloads. As many as I could get. It felt less like greed than compensation. If I couldn’t enter infinity, I could at least surround myself with its echoes—flattened, framed, safe to stack.
What ties all of this together is restraint.
The dream doesn’t read as fear of fire, or lack of desire, or absence of wonder. It reads as someone living with a lot of inner heat and choosing, consciously or not, to manage it so nothing burns down. Someone who carries, catalogs, contains. Someone who knows how powerful things are and therefore keeps them at arm’s length—translated into symbols, art, thought.
I don’t think the dream is asking me to change that overnight. It feels more like a self-portrait than a warning. But it does raise a quiet question: how long does one vacuum fire before forgetting what warmth feels like?
That question lingered after I woke. I think it’s meant to.
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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