Chapter 9.6 - Lucid Dreaming

When the warmth and fragrance of summer welcomed her again Claire instantly knew she was dreaming. Purple clouds were gathering on the horizon and a few gusts of wind whipped the heads of the cattails announcing the thunderstorm in the distance. 

The whole world looked like a patchwork of bright color swatches, tied together by barely visible strands of light. She picked up pieces of reality here and there, they seemed drawn to her fingers, attracted like tiny scraps of paper by static as if her entire being was charged somehow, she could feel it buzzing.

Reality felt soft and yielding under her fingers, she gently shook loose the bits that stuck to her hands and watched them fall back into place and meld into the background like a self healing mat. 

Dazzled, she grabbed a handful of sky and closed her fist around it, feeling its dense substance resist the pressure of her hand with the elasticity of a rubber ball. She opened her fist slowly for a peek and there was light inside it, like all the essence of the sky had been distilled into the substance in her hand.

She grabbed a handful of the flower meadow and closed her other fist around it, and when she peeked inside it she noticed it glowed with its own inner light, soft like that of a frosted bulb.

The two lights didn’t look alike at all, but there was something in their very essence that made them fit, they were two halves of the same whole. She brought her fists together and opened them very slowly, as if she feared that releasing the two essences and letting them blend too fast might cause unknown damage, and when her palms were fully open the mixed substances of the earth and the sky filled the whole space between them and stretched out like taffy when she pulled them apart.

She was still in awe of this miraculous transformation of matter when the silver glow of the giant full moon shone in her eyes and woke her up. The scarce background of a few bare branches in the middle of January made it look even larger and made Claire question whether she was indeed awake or she had slipped into another dream.

It looked like Jane had been right about the full moon after all; after she figured out that she was really awake Claire turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but there was too much light in the room. She worried that she might forget her dream so she grabbed her paint and brushes and painted it right then, in the moonlight, without minding what the colors would look like in the light of day. When she finished she went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until three in the afternoon on the following day.

When she looked at the canvas the next day she was surprised to discover that she had painted light. Not a depiction of light, but light itself, which glowed from the inside of the layers of paint and illuminated the space around it.

It wasn’t a single light either, it had several different temperatures, like fluorescent tubes, the warmer hue of the soft glow, the higher temperature of the cool radiance and a third, the hitchhiker, a silver hue, the light of the moon.

“What is this about, bebelle?” Grandmother approached, puzzled by the weird radiance whose source she couldn’t identify.

“A lucid dream,” Claire smiled. 

“Oh, really?” Grandmother’s curiosity was suddenly heightened. “What about?”

“I dreamed that the whole reality was made entirely out of light,” Claire replied, feeling a little silly about making such an all encompassing statement.

“Isn’t that a fact,” Grandmother laughed.