day twenty-six: I don't sleep, I dream

We live near Interstate 5, and in the summer I sleep with my head next to the window with tips of Seattle skyscrapers lite-brighting our wall. Sometimes when it's warm and we sleep with the window open, I dream big dreams. Once, I dreamt about this wild night scene. I'm convinced it was the closest I've ever come to leaving my body:

The air smells like a mix of sweet from the lavender in our flower box and stale from highway exhaust. I leave the window and crawl through field on field of purple flowers and reach this cliff that slopes toward the interstate.

Look right, there's Mt. Baker, Bellingham, that wall of mountains scuffed up against Vancouver. Look left, there's Mt. St. Helens, red lava like ketchup dripping from her chin. Then past Portland to Ashland. The Redwoods are a lincoln log patch. There's the Bay Bridge, wobbling next to San Francisco, the first city I lived in on my own.

If I look straight ahead, squint past the Sound and over the Olympics, there's the ocean like a thick blue moat--my private zoetrope--animating whole cities in Asia, Siberia, clustered skylines further west.

I am Jude the Obscure--a frame of ruffled feathers. And suddenly, quietly, I push back through the lavender, feathers floating every which way but up.