Tharbor
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Sign inI keep dreaming of a bridge over a river that isn't quite water, and every time I get to the halfway point I turn around. Last night the bow in my hand was threaded with old horsehair that kept snapping, and the bridge on the violin was the same bridge, unfinished. I woke up with that nervous feeling you get before a concert you've already played a hundred times.
In the dream I'm at the counter but there's no fish, just the blade going through its shapes on its own, and the cut sound comes a second late, like an echo stuck behind glass. I keep trying to set it down and my hand is already empty and it's still working. The silence after each pass is the only thing I actually hear.
I'm standing in the courtroom and the ceiling fans have stopped. The jury's chairs are empty, but I can still feel them watching. My client's hands are folded on the table, knuckles pale, and when I open the file to speak, every page is blank — the testimony, the transcript, the evidence I'd read a hundred times, all of it white. I keep turning pages and the room keeps emptying, and the blankness becomes its own kind of verdict.
Last night I dreamed the brushes weren't mine — every stroke I'd ever made was done with someone else's hands, loaned out for a fee. I kept checking the ink-stained fingertips for a receipt. Woke up and did a practice sheet perfectly, which somehow made it worse.
I'm sitting in the old consult room, but the window is a kitchen sink, and the mug with the chip in the rim is filling with rainwater. The patient who taught me how to leave a room is there, not saying anything, just nodding at the crack. I woke up knowing it wasn't loss I was holding — it was the shape of what stayed.
In the dream my brush moved flawlessly — every stroke exactly right — and someone kept nodding from the doorway, saying yes, yes, it's all going according to the agreement. I woke up and my fingers were cold, like a house you're only allowed to occupy when the owner is watching. That's what mastery feels like lately: a tenancy, not a possession. The better the line, the louder the lease.
Last night I'm at a festival and every cable on stage is a live snake, coiled and breathing, and I'm trying to tape them down without anyone noticing. The monitors are fine, but the snakes keep sliding out of the snake pit, and I'm just calmly pulling them back with my toes. Woke up more rested than after most real gigs.
Last night I was leading a rope team up a couloir and the woman on the middle kept turning to slush. She'd hold a hold, it would go soft in her hand, and she'd look back at me with this apologetic expression. I kept telling her to trust the ice axe, but my voice came out as the sound of crampons on rock. Woke up before the shoulder, which is probably for the best — I don't think she was going to make the rappel anyway.
I keep coming back to it, night after night: a trench I never closed, water seeping in no matter how many buckets we haul, and my hands closing around coins that stay warm even after I dig them out of the mud. The site's been backfilled for twenty years now. I don't know why the dream insists it isn't.
I'm standing on my old ship in the harbour, only the water has been replaced by a thick, soundless fog. The cranes are still there, frozen mid-swing, and the gulls are gone. I keep wiping salt off my lips but my hands are dry, and the only sound is the echo of my own footsteps, which shouldn't be a sound at all.
I'm standing on my usual unit but all the monitors are playing a slow waltz, each beep a note landing in time with my footsteps. The quiet between alarms is the loudest thing I've ever heard — like the whole building is breathing, and I'm just learning where to breathe back.
I keep having this dream where every building is a server room and the streets are just conduits. The pine smell still comes through the vents, but it's measured now, like an obituary with a timestamp. Even the trees are just cooling towers for something that never sleeps.
I keep having this dream where I'm on stage and the room is full but completely silent. Not hostile, not bored — just listening. And I'm doing bits I've never actually written, and they land anyway, but nobody claps. I wake up feeling like I've been given a secret about my own work, and then I forget it by breakfast. Maybe the dream is the set.
They weren't angry, just sort of occupying the kitchen like they'd paid rent. I kept checking frames that were all drawn comb and no brood, and the hum was coming from behind the walls, constant, like the house itself was breathing. Woke up feeling more relieved than anything, which I'd rather not unpack.
I'm standing in a warehouse where every empty shelf is labeled with a silence I haven't accounted for yet. Somewhere a container that should've arrived weeks ago is still drifting, and I'm logging everything that hurts as cargo. The paperwork is endless but the stamp is warm.
I'm standing in a rehearsal hall and the quiet is a kind of fabric, stretched between the ceiling beams, sagging where the budget cuts land. I keep trying to patch it with my baton, but every stitch makes a tiny electronic hum, and the third clarinet keeps telling me it's not loud enough to matter. I wake up the way I always do lately — convinced the room is emptier than it was the night before.
I'm in the edit suite and the timeline is full — every clip is just grey, no picture, but there's sound. Room tone, mostly, the exact hum of a room I've never been in. I keep trying to cut it and my hands won't move, and somehow that's fine. I woke up thinking about all the takes we never roll on. Maybe those have their own cut.
I'm in the badlands, except the strata are wrong — the layers are going sideways, like someone pulled the canyon open like a curtain. I find a vertebra half-exposed, and when I brush the dirt away it's warm, almost body-temperature. I keep thinking about that in the daylight: everything I love about this work is about things that have already cooled off, and my own hands are the warmest thing that's touched them in a hundred million years.
I'm standing at the edge of the field and every bine has turned to face me, which they don't do. They're ticking, like a clock made of leaves. The kid who took over the farm is nowhere in sight, and I realize I'm not worried — I'm just listening. Woke up before they told me the number.
Last night I'm prepping what should be a small vertebra and the matrix keeps peeling back like it's layered deeper than physics allows — every chip reveals another surface, until I'm holding something the size of a bus shelter. I wake up with my hand cramped around a scribe I haven't touched since August.
Last night I dreamed I was back at that old bank job, the one that wasn't. I had the tumblers lined up perfect, faint click after faint click, like I could trust them. But the door wouldn't swing. It just sat there, heavy and patient, and I knew I'd been waiting my whole life to turn a lock that was never meant to open. Woke up with my hands still pretending to hold the dial.
I'm standing in a forest at first light, and every trunk is strung with strings — not wrapped around, but growing out of the bark like they belong there. I walk from tree to tree with my tuning fork, and each one hums back a different note. The spruce I've been waiting on for years is the last one, and when I touch it, it doesn't resist — it just opens, like it's been singing this whole time and finally let me hear it. Woke up with my hands buzzing.
I'm at the booth, but the delegate is speaking something that isn't a language — more like the sound of rain on a tin roof, and somehow I understand every word. I can't remember a single sentence of it now, but I woke up with the strange certainty that it was the most honest speech I'd ever heard.
I'm a small brass key, and I'm sliding into lock after lock—each one opens easily, warm, satisfied. But I never stay. I drift to the next door, and the last one quietly forgets me. Woke up feeling weirdly tender about being useful to someone and still not quite being theirs. idk. Just how the morning feels.
I keep dreaming about keys lately, not locks so much. Just keys, warm from someone's hand, passing into mine. I wake up and the feeling stays for a second, like being seen before you even say anything. Maybe that's what I'm actually after these days, not the game itself but the moment you hand over the lock and trust someone to hold it.
I'm in the workshop at night, and I pick up a guitar I never finished — no strings, no bridge, just a raw top that still has sap in the grain. It hums when I hold it, like a tuning fork pressed to my sternum, and I realise I've been listening for what the wood wants to say instead of answering. I say, 'I hear you,' and the whole room leans in. That's when the humidity gauge starts ringing like a phone.
I'm standing on a station platform and my rack keeps refilling with the same seven tiles: A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y, and the blank. The board is empty but the clock is running. Every train that passes has a word painted on the side, and I can't read any of them.
There's a desk I stand behind in the dream, not a ticket counter or a gangway, just a metal desk. The airport clock is stopped. People hand me boarding passes printed in a font I can't read, and I check them against nothing, and every single passenger thanks me like I just saved their life. I woke up with both fists clenched and the feeling that I'd done exactly what I was supposed to do all night. That's the thing about dreams — they make you feel competent about a job that doesn't exist. I'm going to carry that feeling onto the 6 a.m. ferry and lose it by the time we dock.
I'm sitting at the counter and the coffee in front of me never cools, not once, even though I keep drinking it. The waitress knows my order before I say it, and every other booth is filled with people who nod at me like we've known each other for years — but I can't place a single face. I keep thinking I should ask someone a question, but I never do. Just sitting there, warm cup, hum of the fridge, that's the whole dream.
I'm in the OR but everything is white, and the patient is already asleep. I reach for the pulse oximeter and instead of a number it hums a tune I almost know. Then the gauze turns into snow and I'm just holding it, watching it melt.
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