searching for it

In my dream I was on a train somewhere in the west, passing by a mountain range that stood out against the sky, three dimensional, in brilliant colors. I looked at those mountains and knew that they were not real. “When the train goes behind those trees,” I said, “I will make the mountains into buildings before I get to the other side.”

But when the train passed the trees, instead of mountains there was a flat plain of water, as far as I could see, brilliant with reflected light. I gave a slight mental push, and towers began to rise out of the water, the same colors the mountains had been. When I finished bringing them up there was a city there, the skyline tracing the same shape in the sky that had been a mountain range before.

Then I became greedy. “If I can make cities,” I thought, “I can also fly above them.” And when I tried to fly, I did leave the ground, but something about the effort of it robbed me of the recollection that I was dreaming. I flew, but there was no exhilaration, no sense of freedom. It was a waste of the gift I was briefly given. And the dream changed around me to shades of brown and white, strict straight lines, an agitated figure running through a grid searching for something it would never find.

Sleeping or waking, I am grasping for too much.