You enter a place you recognise only by the feeling of having been there before. A corridor extends towards something that should be an exit, although the further you walk the less certain the word exit becomes. The walls remain walls, the floor remains beneath you, yet the place has loosened from its own certainty. Nothing has disappeared. It is only that nothing quite settles.
You look for the harbour and find it waiting somewhere beyond the buildings, a surface of water catching the light, near enough to promise arrival. Yet the way down keeps changing. A street becomes a passage, a passage becomes a room, a room opens onto another room. You continue because there seems to be no reason not to, carrying the vague conviction that somewhere ahead the world will resume its proper arrangement.
But perhaps this is what the dream has taken from you: not the world, but the expectation that it should arrange itself.
A house appears, familiar and altered, its rooms carrying traces of something that has been removed. Furniture shifts. Walls open. Someone has been renovating, or perhaps undoing the renovation. You recognise the place without being able to return to it. The house remains, but the house you knew has become inaccessible within itself.
Then there is the small puncture: an orange bird landing briefly, the unexpected colour against the grey, its tiny body turning towards you before the moment passes. You cannot say why this remains when so much else disappears. The dream offers no interpretation. It simply leaves the bird there, bright and unnecessary, a detail refusing to become a symbol.
Perhaps this is where you keep getting lost.
You want to know whether the emptiness is nothingness, whether the absence is non-being, whether the place is a metaphor for something concealed beneath it. You want the dream to declare what it is. But the more closely you look, the more the distinction between presence and absence begins to soften. The empty room is not nothing. The inaccessible harbour is still there. The corridor has not ceased to be a corridor simply because it no longer knows where it leads.
You remain inside the uncertainty.
For a moment the demand to understand loosens, and something quieter appears: not an answer, but an opening. The place does not need to reveal what it means. It can remain what it is — a place in which the familiar has become strange enough for you to notice that familiarity was never quite as solid as you imagined.
You wake carrying almost nothing.
Perhaps only the feeling of having been somewhere.
Perhaps that is enough.
Notitia — where what remains unresolved is allowed to remain alive.
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