Want and Plenty – A Dreamset (rec)
While our bodies heal, our minds do the work of untangling who we are.
I am held this night by two hands,
Both alike in dignity.
One built for waiting.
One made for wonder.
Walking the breadth of what holds me,
I star-cross through both.
I master neither loss nor finding.
I dream dreams. And I try to understand them and how they reflect my psyche. Though it may be this is just the bramble of a mind repairing itself through sleep.
Dream 001 — Concrete Cage
All night I was lost in a parking garage.
Not a dramatic one—no sirens, no engines, no voices calling out. Just level after level of poured concrete, repeating itself with bureaucratic patience. The air was cool and muted, sound splashed softly over the monolithic walls.
No people. No cars. No sign that anyone had passed through recently. Only long aisles and the quiet suggestion that there must be an exit somewhere, even if I couldn’t see it.
I walked for what felt like hours. I was on dream-time, so clocks had no real power.
The place had rules, that was evident, even if I didn't know what they were. The most important one: I could only walk down the center of each aisle. I knew—instinctively—that drifting toward the edges wasn’t allowed. No peering down ramps. No checking walls for stairwells or daylight. The margins were forbidden. I stayed centered, moving forward because that was the only movement permitted.
I don’t remember panic.
I remember endurance. This was the land of the mule of me.
There was no resolution, I went deeper and deeper and nothing ever changed. It seemed that I was there long enough that I finally understood the place and what it wanted from me: nothing, just to exist and move.
Once that lesson was learned, I roused from slumber. Confused and disoriented. Ready to capture the experience.
Velvet Prison Analysis
This one is weird. It's not like it has a clear message. Or if there is one, it's not black and white. More like it coudl be a lot of stuff. But ultimately, the feeling and the visuals came from someplace in my life.
A parking garage is a deeply in-between place. It isn’t a destination. It isn’t even a pause so much as a holding pattern—where things wait while life happens elsewhere. It occurs to me now, that twice since we left for this journey, we were lost in parking garages looking for uber drivers at airports.
Thinking about that makes me uneasy, because it feels close to how I’ve been living: moving, functioning, advancing through days without quite arriving anywhere that feels like mine.
The emptiness matters. No cars means no evidence of other lives intersecting with my own. No people means no witness. I wasn’t being chased or judged or rejected. I was simply alone with the structure—with repetition, with myself. My thoughts, my actions, my choices (within the implied rules) were entirely mine.
Unusual for my life.
But the rule about the center keeps coming back. The middle is the safest place, yes—but it’s also the place with the least information. Exits live at the edges. So does daylight. So does risk. So maybe this is to suggest that I’m allowed motion, but not exploration. Progress, but not deviation. I can keep going, but only within a narrow, sanctioned lane.
What unsettles me most is how natural this felt in the dream. I didn’t question it. I didn’t test the boundary. I accepted the constraint as if it were law. And it didn't bother me in the least. This was a practiced experience that I accept. That doesn’t feel like fear so much as conditioning—like something learned slowly over time.
I don’t think the dream is accusing me of weakness. If anything, it feels weary. Like a system that has been operating in survival mode for years and has learned that staying centered—staying narrow—is how you make it through the night.
There’s no monster in the garage. No collapse. Just a quiet question pacing alongside every footstep: How long can you keep moving like this? And maybe, underneath that: What would happen if you stepped sideways?
I don’t have answers yet. I’m not sure the dream was asking for them. It wanted attention. It wanted me to notice the shape of the space I’m walking through, and the rules I’ve accepted without remembering when they were imposed.
For now, that feels like enough—to name the place, to trace a few levels, to admit that I’m still inside it, listening to my footsteps echo and wondering where the edges go when I’m finally ready to look.
Dream 002 — The Palace, Between Waking
It's funny to me that we drift from dream to dream, but I can never remember more that one—unless I wake, record and drive away a second time.
Instead of the dark austerity of a parking garage, I found myself in a massive white steel and glass palace. Light soaked everything all at once. It was luminous. It was public, important, and filled to the inch with others.
People pressed in on all sides. Crowds on crowds. Everyone seemed to be greeting one another—hugging, saluting, clasping shoulders with familiarity and relief, as if this were a long-awaited reunion or a celebration they all understood. Everyone but me.
It felt like being in a distant foreign city where you don't speak the language and they don't speak yours.
Everywhere I looked, there were kiosks. And every kiosk was a bookstore.
And every bookseller was the Muse.
She appeared again and again, duplicated across the palace, each version dressed differently—in crisp future-looking suits, blue, green, white, magenta. Always radiant. Always composed. Each time I approached, she wore a giant carnation on her head, absurd and striking, like a costume piece imagined by an author that only had to exist in prose.
I kept trying to see her shoes. It was important, though I couldn’t say why. But every time I got close enough to look, the moment was interrupted—she would place a book in my hands, or offer me a flame.
Never both. Always one or the other.
Then I woke. Briefly. Long enough to see I'd found gold a second time that night and my numb fingers stumbled across the phones screen.
Crystal Palace Analysis
It’s hard not to notice how violently different these two dreams are, especially knowing they shared the same night. The parking garage and the palace feel like opposing poles—containment and excess, solitude and saturation, silence and spectacle.
The palace is everything the garage was not. White instead of gray. Glass instead of concrete. Crowds instead of emptiness. Where the garage restricted movement, the palace overwhelmed it. Where I was alone before, here I was submerged in people, ceremony, contact.
And yet, somehow, I felt just as singular.
The repetition of the muse is what intrigues me most. Not one person in the palace—everywhere. Multiplied, radiant, endlessly available but never fully accessible. Each version offered something meaningful—knowledge, warmth, ignition—but never the thing I was actually trying to see.
The shoes haunt me. Shoes are grounding. They touch the earth. They tell you how someone moves through the world when they aren’t performing. They wrap the precious stems in beauty and protection. I wasn’t trying to possess—I wanted orientation. Proof of contact with the ground.
Instead, I was found symbols.
A book: knowledge stored, meaning in stasis until acted upon—something to study later, alone. A flame feels like immediacy, danger, transformation. Both are gifts. Both are refusals. Neither allows intimacy. Neither answers the question.
The carnation complicates things further. Theatrical, a favored symbol of the muse, so fitting icon—a marker of celebration, devotion, or mourning, depending on context. Framing her larger than life, elevated, untouchable. Not a person so much as a figure, an idea.
And the crowds—everyone greeting everyone—suggest a world where connection is abundant, even easy. Which makes my particular hunger feel sharper by contrast. I wasn’t lost in that palace the way I was in the garage. But I wasn’t at rest either. I wasn't home.
If the garage dream felt like survival—endurance without exit—this one feels like longing without landing. Too much light. Too many meanings. Too many versions of the same person, each offering something adjacent to what I want, but never the thing itself.
What’s strange is that neither dream feels cruel. I wasn't mocked, restrained or threatened. Just a presentation of circumstance. Rules I didn't set or choose, but still obey.
Movement without deviation.
Offerings without grounding.
I don’t know yet how these two dreams speak to each other. I only know they feel paired—like night and anti-night, scarcity and surplus, concrete and glass. Two structures built to hold me, neither of which quite lets me rest.
Maybe the short waking between them matters. A hinge moment. A breath. The mind shifting rooms.
For now, I'll let them live in the lexicon of my imagination. Reflection of the invisible, the subconscious. At least I was moving, not stuck, not without stimuli. The whole point of my Iberian Romance is to explore and discover. Not to receive, nor to conquer.
In both realms, my desire was always just beyond my reach. A circumstance I think I understand well.
Maybe that's the shadow of the real, showing me the shape of my reality.
Or, maybe that's just the direction of the light, reality may turn out very different.
#dream #madrid #essay #travel #wyst
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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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