I’ve been a little unsettled since the day I drank the river water, but I’ve also felt very at peace.
My dreams have remained strange and involved, drawing me deeper into the imagery I experienced on that first night. The pale figures from the river, climbing trees, reaching for the perfect sphere that is the moon – their arms raised as if in prayer… stretching beyond what seems to be the normal range – like, a Mannerist painting I can’t quite remember.
I fell asleep in my large comfortable chair by the window the other day and dreamt my house was my house, but was also the living forest. The floors were plush and mossy green, the wall panels living birch and aspen. The curtains were replaced with swinging vines of ivy, threaded through with winter blooms of hellebore and ivy.
In my dream I rose from my chair and went to the kitchen, I stood at the sink and placed my hands deep into the warm mud that ran from the tap. I felt it squish silkily through my fingers, while also gritting under my nails.
I looked out my window to see Barbie at the fence line, tall and closed-countenance as ever with her large, yellow teeth on full display. But, instead of her worn work coat and boots, she wore a multitude of dirty shawls wrapped in intricate layers over her tall, lanky frame.
In the distance I saw a house on tall thin stilts.
When I woke from my dream I was standing at the sink with my hands in icy cold water.
The view from the window was only a landscape.