Mnemosyne
While reflecting on the Moon card I reread my dream journal, and found frustrating excerpts from a setting I had not realized had been recurring for months. The plot might be different, but the house was always the same. I pulled more excerpts from my journal to build a rough story of strange images, some new and some familiar, and to grapple with the slipperiness of memory.
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Anyone can enter this building, which is dangerous. You step away from this room hallway done-up setpiece and the stairs, I do not want to walk down those stairs. Clues and terrors etched into the walls.
The blueberries will soothe the acid pinning your clothes to your body after the building collapses, the flames, flaming bits of paper not quite ash yet.
Always this shows up in my dreams, a swimming pool atop an ocean tank. Big enough for whales.
The fourth, fifth floor of my house is haunted, and these rooms off the side on the second, third, I go in them, they are uncomfortable, something is there. The top floor, do not go there. I have only opened that door — once? There is an open space — loft room — to the right I have seen in some dreams but the fear there is too strong. The doors in this hallway are better left close. I think peraps lately I haven’t been opening them either. The main room on the second floor is so large, dramatic, long. Dark walls. Navy. Sometimes. Or the museum. The room of figures. Tall hutches.
The generic name Riftia alludes to the rift that formed the geothermal vents where the species inhabits, while pachyptila (pachy; thick + ptilon; feather) refers to the anterior plume of the worm… Isolating the vermiform body from the white chitinous tube, a small difference exists from the classic three subdivisions typical of phylum Pogonophora: the prosoma, the mesosoma, and the metasoma.
Riftia. (2026, February 15). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Riftia&oldid=1338421280
I could put the china and the books in the attic. It could be a start. There are so many strange things down there, things I have no idea where they even came from and now they’re getting hauled around.
He put it up for rent? Why? and I note how I saw the outside of the house and said yes immediately. She is nervous for me. All of these people are dead. She tells me about how (landlord) made you feel so heard, so noticed. A sense that these people are here together because this is a place where they can be together. A strong sensation of not going up another floor. Some kind of undercurrent in the upstairs. The witch in the window is a person, waves but is also startled to realize I’m alive. I can’t really touch them if I try, and likewise they can’t really touch me if they try.
(The turtle is huge, dirty bone white, the literal head of an alligator) a lion takes down a peacock and leaves it there, I beg that it would come back and eat it. Its (rear, deer) haunches folded, bouncing letters in a dangerous pinball-like game of nets, spell DANCE, don’t fall in the water.
I find myself resenting so much that that house shapes it all, when there’s also so much that I can’t fucking remember. This looming shape, sparkling first hummingbird I’m probably remembering wrong the way I was shocked by the actual appearance of my favorite purple rock.
A hint in this dream towards a haunted attic room, deeply frighteningly haunted, that I keep shut, that I know for certain now has recurred. The top of a twisting stairwell, fourth floor, light well, sometimes in perfectly usable room across the landing, sometimes you’ll have to tolerate disturbance there. I know I’ve seen inside it once, dark grayscale vision of a room cut off from sunlight during the day, blackout blinds drawn, a single twin bed against the back wall.
Where do these images even come from? How is any of this so formative when I barely even remember any of it?
Depicts hesitation at the edge of a pond, a fox just under the water (was it dead? Or just waiting?)
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