Dreams I

Last night, I dreamed that I awoke covered in tattoos.

My chest contained a statue of an old man towering over my abdomen, holding a cane to the sky. His figure was neither heroic nor impressive. He slumped under the weight of age and mass, his knees bending in the same fashion as the crook in his back. He was a mossy green sculpture with diamonds tattooed onto his legs. His eyes were cast towards the horizon, his cane cast towards the sky. He stood rusted like a ceremonial figurine long-forgotten by time.

Painted across my right bicep were swaths of red and golden yellow in wavering trigonal patterns. Few of the edges were straight, but the colors never mixed. They formed across my shoulders in a blaze before mixing into an azure hue. All three colors sunk down my left arm in thin tendrils until they reached my forearm.

And across my back hung an albatross with wings spread downward. My memory of its form wavers somewhat here. His head jutted out from a flesh and bone body into a skeletal construction without flesh.  Feathers were neatly tucked into the folds of it's submissive form. It's head craned upward to meet a thin piece of twine that attached it's neck to mine in a noose.

When I awoke, I checked my bodies for the tattoos. The dreams were so vidid, I had trouble separating reality from fictional visions for the brief window I remembered both. I've forgotten every other aspect of that dream, but I remember every square inch of my body through those images.

Our brains conjure strange things.