For several weeks there had been no dreams you could remember. Or perhaps there had been dreams, but no bridge back to them. Only a feeling on waking that something had occurred elsewhere, beyond the reach of language.
Then a fragment arrived.
You are standing on a cliff looking down toward a beach. The ocean stretched outward beneath a pale sky. At the edge of the shoreline enormous cliffs rose from the sea, their faces exposed where the water had withdrawn.
You remember thinking:
It must be a very low tide.
That was all.
No voices. No guides. No dragons. No labyrinths. Only a brief recognition that something usually hidden had become visible.
The dream offered no explanation. It did not reveal what lay beneath the water. Instead it lingered upon a condition. The sea had retreated. The structures below remained.
In waking life you find yourself moving through days with a muted heart. Not grief exactly. Not despair. More a flattening of colour. A quietness that made the world feel distant from itself.
Yet the dream seemed to suggest that absence and emptiness are not the same thing. When the tide recedes, the ocean has not disappeared. It has merely withdrawn beyond the immediate horizon.
Perhaps dreams do something similar. Perhaps there are seasons when the psyche stops offering stories and instead reveals the contours that support them. Ancient formations usually hidden beneath movement.
The cliff from which you look was a place of distance rather than immersion.
And below you, where sea met land, stood evidence that something vast remained, whether I could enter it or not.
Notitia Health 
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