Shadow Dancers.

My favorite time to wake up, owing to my ability to fall asleep with little effort, is during the ambiguous hours of midnight until sunrise. A stretch where time exists only to my spatial opposites of our ever turning world. Though in theory time still exists, the only metronome that suggests linearity is the tree blown across the house in intervals and the shadow dancers on my wall that creep in through the shades.

The light that is not turned away by the slats I find to be drained. The luminescence is wan and alien by either reproduction or imitation, and is oddly invariable, oddly sterile like florescent tubes on a hospital bed. The dance resumes as my consciousness shifts. My eyelids slide as an act of the dream, not in spite of it, and the lines of dream are drawn formlessly on my walls. To call it truly waking would be to assign a daytime term to a dreamtime process.

As conshiftiness occurs, I am softly aware of my surroundings. The dance continues as I roll onto my back and note the ceiling. The shift progresses and the geometric lines above me hinder the process. There is something hidden within the folds of the ceiling, presumably old ductwork that heated the house before it was split into apartments. An ancient heat register that has been roughly painted over looks down on me from its skewed perch. My rational mind attempts to understand the lines. They are absurdly off. Architecturally bunked. Dimensionally awry. In the league of poorly executed handy work are a number of cockeyed pipes running water this way and that, hot and cold, out of one wall and into another. A complex system of interconnected portals feeding the rest of the house.

On one wall the dark shapes of posters and pictures are illuminated harshly by the digital blink of an diode. Two of the posters have names invisibly hanging off of them. The names are slightly askew, from lack of use, as they used to be part of a memory palace. Clarence White is on the left, Robert Fripp on the right. In fact, now that I think about it, Scotty Moore, John McGlaughlin, and Les Paul are attached furtively to three other objects in view. Frank Zappa is under me. T Bone Walker is in the closet.

I pull the comforter up over my cold shoulder and turn another 90 degrees. I see a green blanket draped over the back of my wife. Again my eyelids slide in time with the dancers on the wall. The shift reverses, I bury my head and wiggle closer to her. My room was just a stop on my dream journey, possibly to fill up. And now the conshiftiness is creating poorly built palaces surrounded by a moat guarded with snapping turtles and inside the walls there is a dance going on. Hand in hand, they slowly turn in the wan light of the few beautiful ambiguous hours.