At night, when the sun is extinguished and the world becomes unconscious, we inhale the dark wet vapors and sink into death-like sleep. Heraclitus ~ “Fragments”

I've studied sleep
watched waves on screen*
rock lullaby-like from alpha to theta.
Surfacing then,  comes the turn
of a kaleidoscope

 in snatches of colour, story patterns
 settling into shape, recurring replays, 
and ghosts mostly, resurrected...

You and I train travelling
never arriving, sun in my eyes,
tears in yours.  A perverse reversal.
Just wish fulfilled in that small light
there where the tunnel ends.

I've walked a most beautiful bridge
fine and filigreed,  high into clouds
stretching out a hand you could 
not grasp.  Ours an impossible love.
Or grounded and fleeing, impeded
with snakes underfoot, like hurdles
of intimacy,  fatal to my Achilles heel.

Pursued once by a trinity of vampires
spurting for the crossroads, for salvation
with the name of Jesus stuck in my throat.
More often though, a diabolic elevator
hurtling up, or down to infinity
under its own power of entrapment.

And those long, narrow corridors
manifold doors and one I often choose
entering stage left. The footlights, 
an audience, the actors in dialogue
and in between their words, expectancy
stretching to panic.  A rummage for clues; 
what play, what lines. what cue.
REM is for remembering
so I wake, and still to this day, not knowing
what part I am to play.

• In one of my several manifestations I have been a sleep researcher
• Brain signals in alpha waves when relaxed. Theta waves occur during light sleep or deep relaxation.
• REM – rapid eye movement of sleep stage, resembling wakefulness and in which we are most likely to remember our dreams though we dream in other stages too.

For Sanaa’s Poetics prompt Dream Interpretations we are doing just that though this poem runs the gamut of several. Title is taken from a poem I wrote in 2022 “A Private World“