Illusion and Dream

Against the darkness in my mind,
I see faint starlight.
A woman dances, in the ethereal gleam,
Held close by a man she doesn’t know.
Yet they sway in perfect harmony
As he leads her across the floor.

The melody fades, the image dulls
And I see a room with mirrors...
Shadows through smoke,
Distorted reality and a single pure note.
The face in the mirror
Belongs to a stranger...
Reflections of a yearning, too hard to ignore.

Reaching out to touch an illusion
And to live a practiced dream,
I set sail a little paper boat
Into a turbulent stream...
And pray it safely reaches the other side
Through the uncertainty of the game...

To the island that is inside me,
To a nameless face that resides within
To bring to life the reason
Why the stars sometimes glow brighter
In their pattern through the skies,
As they shine and spell out destiny’s trail.

Abyss

Where do you draw the line between a dream and a nightmare?
Can you identify the point where one ends and the other begins?

The dream is good and the feeling is one of pure joy, with everything going the way you always hoped. The touch seems real and the happiness you feel is unbound, overwhelming…surreal. For a moment, you step away from the person that is you in your dream, and simply observe. You know it’s just a story that’s unfolding in front of you…that it isn’t true…that it’s got to be some waking thought that has percolated into this illusion…but for that one infinite moment, you almost believe.

You wake up, with flashes of the dream still vivid in your mind…but what you remember most, is the way you had felt, which only magnifies the loneliness you feel now. It awakens the void within you, which exists in the real world, where the players, having departed, will never return to fill. You realize what you’re missing, a hundred times over, and with a degree of despondency, recognize that you can’t control or keep the players in real life, any more than you can, in your dream.

Maybe this is where the dream ends and the nightmare begins. When you wake up. To have touched elation, to have tasted desire, and to have seen it dissipate when your eyelids flew open. To perceive the depths of the abyss you’re helplessly falling into, and to know that in your waking hours, the closest you can come to living the dream, is by dreaming wide awake.