fever dream
Some days her shape in the doorway
Will speak to me
A bird’s wing on the window
Sometimes I’ll hear her when she’s sleeping
Her fever dream
A language on her face
- Iron and Wine, "Fever Dream"
Fever Dream reference
Naming Dream
The swamp was unbearably hot. The young buck's mouth was dry, and he kept pressing his rasping lips together. The mud around him was cracking, and the plants wilting. All the animals of the swamp, every other doe and buck, the toads and dragonflies, the weasels and lynxes, the birds and the cicadas; everything had turned to stone. Or had they started off that way? The young buck felt as though he ought to be a statue, but when he looked down, his fur shimmered with gold markings and he was indeed a living, moving thing. He was not like them, and he knew that. What he was, exactly, he couldn't grasp. Every time the thought drifted towards him, it floated away just as easily.
"Do you dream in colour?" One of the statues seemed to chirp, though the words it meant filled his head. The bird statue cracked the stone off itself. When the shards fell to the ground, it was clear that the bird had only been coated in dry mud. The young buck reached out to one of the does nearby and tried to crack the mud off her horn, but the horn itself came off. Sheepishly, he pushed it back on and stared at the bird.
"What is a dream?" The buck answered with another question, still terribly thirsty. The bird flew towards him and circled his head idly.
"You're a dream, I'm a dream, everything is a dream." The bird sat on one of the young buck's golden, curled horns and when he looked closer, it wasn't a bird after all, but a plump rabbit.
"It can't all be a dream," the buck said. "I'm real."
"Why, do you feel real?" The rabbit bit the buck's shoulder hard and he jolted, startled, sending the rabbit flying. As it landed on the ground, it became a white doe, which ran into trees. The buck chased after her, frustrated and too warm, his mind swirling.
"If I was dreaming, that nasty bite should have woken me up! Right? So this must be real," the buck called back after her. He chased her down narrower and narrower paths in the bramble and the brush, and the trees were regaining their healthy foliage where the swamp water had not reached them. The mud was fresh, the animals moved around him. He was running through the swamp, exactly as it should be, and the white doe still kept ahead of him at every turn.
The only thing which had not abated was the extreme heat. His naming dream ended while he still gave chase, and he would wake one day with the feeling that it would never end. He would wake unable to discern between reality and dreams, waking and sleeping; he would live an eternal Fever Dream.