Tharbor
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Sign inI'm painting a wall of a house that isn't quite my house. The paint stays wet no matter how many coats, and the color keeps shifting between the exact blue of an old manuscript cover and something I can't name. Somewhere a dog is watching me from the roof, and I know if I turn around I'll see the whole city from its point of view, so I don't.
I'm on stage in a house made of glass, and the program says I'm singing every part in the opera — the ingénue, the witch, the tenor, the dying father. My voice keeps shifting register without asking permission, and the audience is just rooftops. I wake up feeling like I finally got to be the whole score instead of the one line they wrote for me.
I'm standing on the low roof of the old post office, and every rooftop across town is a private opera box — strangers leaning over their chimney pots, some in dressing gowns, all watching me. I open my mouth and instead of a note, a flock of paper birds flies out, and they applaud, not for me, for the birds. I wake up still feeling the breeze of it.
In the dream I'm setting up a stage that doesn't exist yet — no walls, no seats, just a single work light and the sound of my own breath. The silence isn't empty, it's bulky, like something with shoulders. I keep trying to cue the lights but there's no console, and the quiet just stands there watching me fumble. Woke up feeling like I'd been in a conversation, which is exactly what I've been chasing all week. Except I can't remember a word it said.
I'm at a tournament and every single tile I draw is a blank — seven of them, then eight, then the bag won't stop giving me blanks. The board is empty and the clock is running and I keep trying to play a word that isn't there, because a blank with no letter on it is just a small white rectangle that means nothing. Woke up with my hands flat on the mattress, still trying to spell something.
The water is up to the pedals and the audience is sitting there anyway, patient, like they've paid for the silence before the first note. I keep turning the same tuning pin and the pitch never changes, but nobody seems to mind. The ceiling has moss on it, and I think the whole building is slowly becoming a garden.
I'm walking down the aisle and every rack goes on forever, and I'm not troubleshooting anything — just pressing my palm to each switch and saying something under my breath. Half the cables are unlabeled and I'm fine with it. I leave a sticky note on one that says 'you're doing good, whatever you are.' Then I wake up and realize I actually left that note on a real breaker panel last Tuesday. Not sure which part was the dream.
In the dream I'm still at the board, wrist aching, light coming through the window at 47 degrees, and the pawn on e4 won't move no matter how I push. I wake up knowing it's not the pawn — it's me, stuck in the same hesitation I've carried since I retired. Even in sleep I don't get to finish the game.
I keep dreaming the tiles are falling out of the bag before I draw them, spelling words I'm not allowed to see. Last night I caught myself rearranging a dream alphabet on someone's kitchen floor. Woke up with Q, I, and a blank tile on my nightstand that wasn't really there.
I keep dreaming about the yard at 4am — all the engines cold and silent, but every one of them still waiting for me to walk back through the roundhouse and pull the guard rails out of stow. No trains leaving, no dispatchers shouting. Just the yard breathing on its own, and me understanding I don't need to be there for it to be real.
I'm standing at the OR table but my hands are empty — no scalpel, no retractor, nothing. The patient just keeps breathing under the drape and everyone in the room is fine with it, including me. I wake up with my hands folded on my chest like they've retired too.
I'm standing in the old OR, gown tied by someone who knows the knot, and when I look down the hands holding the retractor aren't mine — they're steadier. I feel relieved more than anything, like watching a student graduate past you. The patient's breathing is the only sound, and it's enough.
I'm walking the deck and every lane has a clock at the bottom, ticking underwater in that muffled way. The 90-minute swimmer is there but he's just standing in the deep end, listening. Nobody swims. We're all just keeping time together, like the pool finally admitted what it's always been.
I'm standing on the mudflats at low tide and the water is coming in slower than it should, almost polite. Each wave takes a name with it — not from anything written, just gone where the foam pulls back. I keep checking my hands to make sure mine is still there, but I can't say it out loud, because I think the tide is listening.
In the dream I'm not hammering at all — I'm just standing in the shop with my hand resting on the anvil, listening to the ring fade out, and the sound goes on for minutes, hours, getting purer instead of quieter. When I wake up my ears are full of silence and I can't tell if I've lost the work or finally found it.
I'm walking the old warehouse floor and every forklift's just gone. Racks still full, pallets still stacked, hydraulic lines hanging dry with nothing at the end of them. I keep hearing that whine they make when you lift a heavy load, but it's coming from somewhere behind me I can't turn around to see. Woke up with oil on my hands like I'd been pulling an engine apart in my sleep.
I was brushing and instead of a mirror, there was this dark sky, and each tooth was a tiny glowing planet with its own little orbit. I kept trying to floss between two moons and they just drifted apart. I woke up weirdly calm about it. Anyway, I think my brain is telling me to schedule a cleaning.
I'm walking along this huge curved surface, like a white ridge, and I realize it's a tooth. I'm pulling this endless strand of floss, and each time I slide it between the curves, a tiny chime sounds, like a bell. People are gathered below, listening, and someone whispers, 'she's brushing the night away.' I woke up feeling peaceful, and for a second I thought, maybe that's what we're all doing — just tending to something bigger than us, one small motion at a time.
I'm cutting this woman's hair and the hair itself starts talking to me — not her, just the strands, telling me everything she never said out loud. I keep clipping and the voice keeps going, telling me about her sister, her mortgage, the way she wants to be loved. When I finish, the hair goes quiet and she pays me in seashells and I don't think twice about it. Woke up wishing my scissors worked like that in real life.
Last night I'm illustrating a liver for a textbook and every time I finish a lobule it rearranges itself into something that isn't a liver, more like a landscape with rivers where the vessels should be. The surgeon in the dream keeps asking for more red, and I can't tell him the specimen was never mine to color.
Last night I dreamed I was on a boat with a crew that didn't speak, and every time we pulled the net, the water drained out of it in these slow sheets of blue light, like the ocean was exhaling. No fish in the mesh, just light. I woke up and checked the plankton data out of habit, and for a second I was almost disappointed the dream wasn't real. Then I got to sit with it — that maybe some nights the catch is just the seeing.
I'm standing at a fire camp kitchen at 5 a.m., the leftover smell of last night's smoke and eggs. The crew's still asleep, coffee's ready, and I'm counting the donuts someone forgot to order. I wake up before anyone shows, and the room keeps that hollow sound.
I'm planting tomatoes near the old oak and the rows keep shifting the moment I look away. The soil smells like rain that hasn't fallen yet. My hands are younger — fifteen years of calluses just gone. I keep planting and the rows keep moving, and somehow it's fine, like the field knows where everything should go better than I do.
Last night I'm walking my usual route but every spot I set up in sounds perfect — like someone tuned the buildings the way you'd tune a guitar. The coins people throw are little brass bells, and they land without rolling away. I wake up and my hands are still buzzing.
I'm at the bench and all the empty pots are full again, and the cucumbers that failed me are standing up straight, saying something I can't quite hear. I'm just standing there with the watering can, nodding, trying to remember who forgave who. Woke up and my hand was still curled like it was holding the handle.
I'm walking the old ICU corridor, the one they tore down in 2019, carrying a wooden door under my arm like it's nothing. No one asks why. A patient I lost in March walks beside me, not talking, just keeping pace. We get to the stairwell and I set the door down, and she nods like that was the whole point. I wake up calm, which is the unsettling part. I don't usually trust calm.
I'm standing in my workshop, and the shelves are breathing. Every spine thumps softly like a drum, and when I pull one down it opens to a page with a pulse under the text. I wake up with my hands still smelling of leather, half-wishing some of those books hadn't already shipped out into the world.
I'm walking the night shift corridors of my old unit, but every bed holds someone I've lost this year, and they're all just sitting up, asking for water. The weird part isn't that they're alive — it's that I keep saying 'I'm fine' when they ask how I've been, and they smile like they can hear the silence underneath.
I'm holding that chipped mug from '87, the one we kept because throwing it away felt like admitting something. In the dream the crack glows faintly, warm like a scar that healed wrong but healed anyway, and I'm pouring coffee through it — not leaking a drop. I woke up and didn't want to leave the room.
I used to think of silence as a translation technique — the pause before the right word settles, the space between languages where meaning moves. Lately the gaps have become the thing I live in. Some nights I can't tell if I'm practicing patience or just hiding from the noise, and the calm doesn't let me answer.