Lucid Life

Sleep opens like a quiet door in the back of the mind,
and suddenly I’m among people who feel
both invented and inevitable.

They greet me with names that shimmer
like candles underwater,
faces soft as moonlit stone.
I tell them plainly, I’m dreaming,
yet the air answers in warm breath,
their hands solid as oak bark,
and I stand there suspended
between truth and a truth‑shaped illusion
that feels no less real.

The landscapes return the way seasons do,
steady, familiar, unexplainable.
Jagged mountains rise like the ribs of the earth,
each summit pulling me upward
the way a memory tugs on the chest.
Then the sea opens in blue certainty,
dolphins carving spirals through dawn‑colored water,
whales singing from a depth
that feels like the heartbeat of the world.

Moments later, I’m in an F1 cockpit,
the engine a metallic prayer beneath me
where speed becomes a kind of temporary immortality.

Nocturnal sleep also calls back the past,
but with softer lighting, gentler gravity.
Old friends and former lovers
meet me beneath skies that feel borrowed.
They speak simply,
no edge, no shadows,
explaining where we bent, where we broke,
as if turning pages in a book
neither of us finished writing.

And then come the dogs I’ve loved and lost,
racing toward me with tails like metronomes of joy,
their fur carrying the smell
of mornings long gone but never erased.

When the dream dissolves into morning light,
something inside me rises with it,
a steady, ember‑warm certainty.
These night worlds offer
the conversations I don’t have,
the companions daylight never quite brings,
the wild terrains that lift me
beyond the dry weight of waking hours.

And so I get up,
not reluctantly, but with purpose,
as if the dream world has signed a quiet contract
with the seeming perpetual chaos of waking hours ahead,
promising that both are worth living.

Yes…

There’s magic in that moment one drifts off

Knowing friends and favorite places are waiting

on the other side of closed eyelids,

smiling in their subtle way.