The Dreaming House

You descend the stairs to a room filled with feathers, each as soft as clouds, so thick the floor is barely visible in the spaces between them. There are no walls, only bars on either side of you that outline a winding corridor, like the bars of a large birdcage.

You continue down the hall, where the feathers and metal converge to a door. Through it is a room filled entirely with evergreen trees, each as silver as tinsel, glowing as though lit from within. Their light is a ruler that measures your shadow.

You catch glimpses of figures, here and there, flitting from tree to tree. A blonde pig-tailed girl in a muslin gown, an old man holding a pipe, wreathed with smoke. A young woman with a handkerchief soaked in blood. An adolescent with short cut hair and a soft face who is not masculne, but too boyish to be a girl. You do not catch a glimpse of the same person twice.

Beyond the line of a group of trees is a wooden door, set between two trunks, and beyond it a room of such lightlessness that you are blinded. There are no walls that you can feel, and were your feet not firmly planted on the ground you might believe that it does not exist either. It is not until the first of the stars reveal themselves that you realize you are in an open space, as vast as a desert. It is, in fact, filled with sand, soft beneath your feet, white as snow. There is no door behind you.

You follow crest after crest until you fear there is no end to this desert. Perhaps you were wrong to choose that door in the trees. Perhaps you were wrong to leave the birdcage-hall. But in the dip between two hills is a trapdoor, and beneath it, a ladder made only of playing cards.

You fear, as you descend it, that it will break, but it holds steady until you stand in a hallway lined with mirrors. They are pieces of glass, of all shapes and sizes, framed and unframed, circular and triangular and in lines and jagged mosaics. Each one is different, you realize, as you pass them. In some your boots dissappear, in other they reappear, with extra buckles or without. In one mirror there is a hat on your head, in another it is gone. In one mirror your shadow has vanished, only to reappear in the next.

In one mirror a hand is on your shoulder, but when you turn to see its owner, you find nothing.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by Anonymous