once upon a time i had a dream––tell me what this means..

we are upon a bleak alpine plateau high in the mountains––surrounded by austere glacial terrain and thin, biting air. scattered across the plateau are enormous feeding troughs—long mangers like those used for livestock, but grotesquely magnified to a cyclopean scale. i find myself confined within one of these troughs alongside other children and friends, crowded together like animals awaiting slaughter..

towering above the plateau loom colossal giants––their physiognomies marred, grotesque and clownlike, almost like exaggerated anime caricatures. from time to time their immense hands descend from the sky, vast probing fingers sifting through the trough as though selecting morsels from a dish..

one by one they curate someone from among us, lifting them into the air between their fingers and devouring them––whole or piecemeal. i evaluate friends being seized and consumed as we scramble helplessly within the trough, comprehending that at any moment those monstrous fingers may descend again and select me next..

then suddenly a military detachment arrives and descends upon the plateau. they strike the giants down and rescue those of us who remain alive. for a moment i collapse into overwhelming relief––having escaped the grotesque fate of being harvested like livestock..

but the reprieve is only provisional..

the soldiers inform us that the only way out is to descend the mountain along an extremely perilous escarpment carved into the side of a sheer rock face. the path is narrow––sometimes scarcely wider than our boots––stretching for miles along a vertiginous drop into an immeasurable abyss..

we begin the descent. the rock wall rises beside us while the void opens endlessly below. as we traverse the exposed ledge i watch friends––teenagers and children––lose their footing, vanishing into the depths below..

at last i reach a section of the escarpment where the ledge narrows to only inches of stone beneath my feet. i stop there, suspended between the mountain and the abyss, seized by a profound and paralyzing dread. the air feels impossibly thin, the silence immense..

and in that suspended moment—poised precariously between ascent and fall, between terror and resolve—i awaken out of and into disconsolation..

where are you..

LS