Night Dreaming in the Wasteland

She looked out at the wasteland around her. Dead and dying, all was a dry, grey lifelessness of entropy. There was no rich darkness, no fertile black to rest in and hold the dream of rebirth. There was no effervescent and profuse light of life and joy to animate the land. Dispirited curls of dust spiralled in the desolate wind, clouding the perpetual half-light.

The woman sighed as she dug her fingers into the dead, sandy soil, inert and cold. There was work enough for her to do, here in the empty depths. She laid on the ground and let herself drift into sleep, slipping into a night of dreams. There, all sprung from her musing mind, the chaos and awe and beauty of life and creativity. She found her way into true darkness and wrapped it around herself, pulling seeking tendrils in, closer and closer about her, gathering them to the warmth of her body. In this jet-blackness there were distant brilliantine glimmers of starlight and coruscating serpentine greens and yellows. Faint, so very faint, but they were there, secret promises of the dark.

When she woke, she collected the darkness she had pulled around herself and laid it out on the earth, luxuriously opulent, cloaking the grey and lifeless hard ground in all the potential of a night of dreaming. First she tugged and pulled the strands out, but eventually they began to flow from her, pooling about her feet like shadows as she moved across the arid plain. There seemed to be no end to it. The faint sparkles glimmered, and she smiled to see them, reflecting the light back upon the velvet richness of night dreams.

Then she got to work, using her fingers to mix the glimmering blackness into the grey soil beneath, reflecting the light of her work and heart down into the earth. It was hard work, and she sweated, wiping newly-mixed soil across her brow as she wiped the beads of sweat away. The sweat dripped down onto the earth beneath her as she worked, finding a path through the desiccated land, down into the hibernating heart. With the perpetual twilight, there was no signal from the setting sun that it was time to lay down her work for the day, but she listened to her body that spoke in ache and weariness, and when she was tired, she laid down to sleep again.

And so she continued like this, pulling more fertile darkness from her dreams, reflecting more shining light as she worked. Soon, she started to see small shoots appear from the earth, delicate and vulnerable, new life of emerald green, trembling in the breeze. She tended these shoots with love and gentleness, her sweat and light and dreaming feeding the growing life. As the shoots grew, a subtle change in the light started, slowly becoming darker as the woman slept, and lighter as she worked. Sapphire blue started to creep into the sky as she worked during the day, and stars shone with pulsing diamond-beams into the night.

One morning she woke to the sound of birdsong, filling the bright blue sky with blissful curls and spirals of delight and exaltation. The growing shoots had become wildflowers, great trees, and thorny shrubs, filled with life and colour and wonder, bursting with berries and blooms, birds and beetles. Animals moved through, flying, walking, stalking, creeping, wriggling, burrowing, bringing the song of the morning to all corners of the earth.

Then rain started to fall, out of the bright blue sky, gently caressing the awakening land. It formed in pools and lakes, gathering into streams and rivers, filling quickly with those that swam and hopped and dived beneath the surface. These sacred waters flowed under sky and over land, cleansing and cooling and nourishing. Life returned to the wasteland, through the dreaming in darkness, through sweat of the brow and the light of the heart.

© Elena Tornberg-Lennox 2023

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