dreaming worlds

Dreams are weird things but I once had one, a night time sleeping dream, that was so real I remember it now better than I do the faces of some long lost old friends. We lived on the top floor of an elegant house on Providence's Benefit St., a spacious aerie with many windows looking over the city. The floors were polished golden parquet and between the front and back parlors was an arched and pillared colonnade. Not that any of this matters but I wanted to let you visualize the setting.

In my dream I was sitting on the chesterfield in the front parlor watching as the city lights met the starry night sky in the distance when I heard the chime of a tiny bell to my right. The door of the vestibule opened and three ladies dressed in pitch-black robes stepped into the room as though from a little elevator descended from another world. Their faces and hands sparkling with tiny points of colored luminescence, they walked into the room ignoring me and laughing between themselves. I tried to talk to them, wanting to know where they were going and if I could join them, but they deliberately pretended not to see me. Somehow I knew it was a considered strategy of theirs and I watched helplessly as they walked through the next room to another door which opened to a radiant though otherwise indescribable vista. They passed through but before the door closed the last one turned and whispered, 'Not yet'. They were the dark angels of a vision I've never forgotten.

Years later, two months before my birthday, I decided to make gifts for the ladies in my office and a couple of other special friends. It took most of that time to make their little embroidered, quilted faces, bodies of black velvet filled with rice, antique silk head-dresses and little black wings. There were 2 dozen ladies in that office, some whose company I enjoyed more than others, and on the morning of my birthday I carried 2 dozen little rice angels to work. Each was wrapped like a bouquet in thick red film and each had an individual special message inside a heart shaped tag. When you think about it there's always something good to say to everyone.

Not long after that birthday I suffered a grand mal seizure which led to surgery and months away from work. I've wondered now and again if that little tribe didn't help with the good results that ensued. We never really know anything.

The two I kept live on a shelf nearby and are pictured here. They look nothing like the angels in my dream but serve as a hint and a reminder of deeper mysteries.