#3

This blank slate here inside my skull is frustrating me. In dreamland this place is dark and close, a nursery rhyme of candle and nimble, quick and I hope it sticks. It's an old chalkboard, this expanse of darkboard. Old, old, old. I can see the scratchmarks and indentations, the pockmarks of time passing over its surface. There are D'Nealian guide lines permanently etched into the slate -- these are my patterns and my habits, my beliefs and my love, from age of sunshine and sticky hands to age of checkbooks and reality television.

I feel like I need to go on about this place, this darkness. It haunts me like no other place, either in my head or my songs, or out there in the real world. There is a mystery here, a sonorous thrum beneath it all, a white noise drowning out the something more that must be there.

Past lives, ahoy! That must be what it is!

OK, so. There's scratching and remnants, chalk powder memories, and right before I can pick them all up in my head, they disperse. Tonight, a little something caught my eye. The neatness of a man's profile. He's impossibly perfect, you see. His profile, set, assured. He's got starched collar and expensive shoes. They were made for show, they were made for running. His cuffs come out from his sleeves just so, the suit fitted within millimeters of his body, draping in dark material, black on white, trim and tidy and logical. He's got that blankness that matches my slate, but he's got no ghosts, no nothing to indicate kickball and four square and passing notes in class and first cars and curfews. He is so clean. This I don't get.

I'm not too good with the lucid dreaming - I think I enjoy my subconscious far too much to try and manipulate it, but tonight I told myself to relax, to listen, and listen hard. The profile's still perfect, right, and the tie is perfectly knotted, but oh, there's something else there. Anxiousness. He doesn't want me looking. He feels impatient. Impatient! A man who seems to have it all, held tightly between fingers, the set of his lips, the sweep of hair apparently cut and styled this morning. With the whole world before him (I see this now - he encompasses, he controls, he sees more than me, but he doesn't want to, sometimes), he is waiting, he is pursuing.

This is only a moment of dreamtime, mind you. This is his profile, in brighter than normal light, for one instant.

I have never seen this man before, but now he's become another chalk ghost, a remembrance. He's holding on too tightly. He doesn't see the sand slipping through his fingers.

This pleases me. Why?