The Map of Dreams

What do we look for in these dreams?

We hold a map and we pore over it together, looking for a way through, looking for a route that will take us along the dream routes to a new place, a place for us to be together.

We have walked the dream corridors of this deserted mansion, opening doors into rooms that hold nothing of all we have ever wanted and dreamt about. We have searched those echoing empty rooms from doorway to window and back. We have felt along the bare walls, hoping to find some secret route out of that place. All we ever found were more bare rooms and more long corridors with doors of possibility stretching off along the length of the corridor and leading only to another door leading to a stairway that led to more floors of corridors and empty rooms.

Then, one day we found a room that had once been a library, its floor-to-ceiling shelves, empty of books and, somehow, looking emptier than any other room because of those bare shelves.

Then, on the last shelf of the bare library, just before we turned back and left it we found this map, rolled up, covered in dust and forgotten.

Then, many days later, after nights spent huddled in corners of dark bare rooms listening to the howling creatures haunting the world beyond the house, we found our way down a long sweeping staircase. The staircase ended in a hall devoid of anything except a mirror and a locked door, which lead out into this world we now stand lost in, turning the map and trying to place ourselves on it.

If we could find our way back to that mansion, we would go back, shut the door behind us and – instead – step together through that mirror, into a different world altogether, back into some dream far different from this one.