Marian Blue Visions

Lately, I have been having the wildest dreams. Some I remember as reality, some pass through me like ghosts. I can't recall any of the details, but I do know they possessed my body and soul. The dreams that I do remember are as fragile as the dance of butterflies. I fear they will slip from my memory, and I do not have a habit to dream journal (yet).

While I am well aware that most dreams are our minds’ way of patching together layers of the mundane life and what it perceives, consciously or not, I do think that some dreams are well beyond any interpretation. They are what they are, a living presence in their own right, and we are simply an intrusion in their reality and not the other way around. I think that’s why I stopped trying to interpret them and let go of this heavily infused cultural conditioning.

The colour blue is starting to make sounds in my ears. It’s faint, but I can tell it has so much to tell me. It comes in my dreams often, so much so that one of my nicknames had blue in it. I write this as I stare at a dark blue ceramic whale sitting on my desk, and a baby blue titled The Sounds of Waves by Yukio Mishima. If blue is so dominant in my subconscious, then it comes as no surprise that most of my dreams would be tinted in it. So, without further ado, here is an attempt at dream journaling, and let the blue run down the pages like ink on paper and pray that in this representation is as close to the dream reality as can be, though I am certain I have missed a handful of threads tracing it back:

I find myself roaming a street I’ve never walked before. A rush of panic rose within me as I saw the frantic woman searching for her lost dog. Palm trees ablaze, the sky wrapped in blood-red smoke, and the street was filled with lost creatures; it didn’t matter how many times their names were called, they were all lost together. A Marian blue gown emerges through the fog, like a little dot of light—a lighthouse in the midst of the storm. Such a familiar figure, yet so unrecognisable from this distance. I see her with multiple rosary-like leashes, guiding the lost animals, and I giggle at the sight of a pig amongst them, thinking even the most gluttonous of creatures was in her grace, and here I am amongst the crowds, praying for a glance. The closer this faceless lady in a Marian blue gown moved towards the assemblages of people, the more the image became vivid, though the circle of people grew wider too.

The scene was now glitching, as if an intrusion was about to occur, and I felt my soul tense in my body. I am about to be pulled out of this merciful presence and into a reality that is not my own, I thought. But then she held my gaze. All fell silent. Faceless as she was, I knew she was looking only at me. Faceless as she was, I knew exactly who she was depicting.

Lo and behold, a child was in her arms, clothed in wings of indigos, deep purples, petrol blues, and muted mossy greens. I couldn’t see her face from the shadows of the people around and the thick red fog. A child before whom every person bowed. Her laughter filled the air with forgiving sweetness, redemption hoofing at her fingertips. I pushed my body against the masses to get closer, but she lifted one tiny hand, signalling me to stop, and so I did. My heart broke in that moment. Although I was permitted to witness her coming into this world, the welcome from the other side, where I once ruled, was now revoked.

This child was healing everything, one soul at a time, by simply breathing the same air. Resurrecting that which has long died, and filling lungs full of life with each of her exhales. A craft I was taught once by a faceless lady in a Marian blue gown. And when I lifted my head, she was suddenly so close to me that she felt like my own skin, eyes spearing right through mine: one brown, almost black, the other cloudy grey, like storm clouds as they collect before the rain. Yet behind it shimmered the glimmer of the other side. I know those eyes. I know them better than my very own.

And as she looked at me, she was no longer smiling. She raged with such grief that the earth beneath our feet began to crack. She pushed herself away from the lady in Marian blue and reached her arms toward me. The moment she was in my arms, she started keening like a banshee; every living and nonliving thing was now bent like broken trunks of trees, and onto their knees they splintered. She opened my mouth with her little hands and forced her forearm inside, all the way to my oesophagus, pulling out lump after lump, as though searching for something, my voice perhaps, but my alogia was all there was to find.

And oh my God... I have reduced this force to an infant, held by a heavenly mother, so far removed from this world, she’d become so small. And still the world trembled at her presence. There is so much memory buried within each of her feathers, so much loss, so much to gain in this remembrance, as I grieve that which I cannot revive from this realm of the unknown. I once saw with those same eyes: the dark brown perceiving all things earthly, the cloudy grey, diamond-visioned eye saw all else. I held the world like a pearl in the oyster shell that is now labelled eyelids, each lash fluttered like wings and shifted the sands of time like waves chasing the tides.

And now? I see nothing.