It was about three in the afternoon when I found myself on a pier in the middle of a forest, with a small gathering of friends. There was some talk of exploring because we all had found ourselves there unexpectedly but not alarmingly. The forest reminded me of those that grow across the coastal regions in the Carolinas, or at least those that can be seen along the interstates. In the gaps between the planks of the pier I could see shoots of grass and clumps of weeds, tending more towards yellows and pale greens than towards the deeper browns and drab olives indigenous to the Midwest. Where we stood the sky was a pale grey ceiling over the path that bent suddenly into the distance on either side. The pier was no different than any pier I had ever been on, with the exception of its apparent length and tendency to bend irregularly out of sight so that you were always on the cusp of a bend but never actually perceived the turn. There was a wooden railing on either side, reinforced by the thick underbrush that almost touched the chest high railing. Where we stood, it felt as if the pier was precariously floating on the surface of the amber brush. What was especially odd (as in all dreams) was the lack of shadow. Which is not to say they were entirely absent, but the golden grey afternoon light was so diffused it was as if every object, regardless of its density, had furnished its own internal illumination. Gradually becoming accustomed to the unfamiliar surroundings, silently soaking in every detail, we began walking. At first the scenery did not change but for the particulars. Here and there a sapling tree approached the railing, often the only reminder that we were indeed moving through space. Every several hundred yards the pier would empty into an octagonal landing, with wooden benches attatched along the railing. These landings tended to signify an abruptly shift in direction, usually of only fifteen or twenty degrees and almost always to the left. Occasionally the path did bend to the right, and when it did so it heightened our sense of mystery. We walked without speaking; allowing ourselves to silently converse with the surroundings that gradually became more golden as the sun shrank unseen behind the overcast clouds. I don't know how long we had been walking, or how far we had come, when we found ourselves upon a fork in the pier. Still without any need for words we split into two groups and agreed to share our discoveries when the pier inevitably joined again. The angle that the pier split was very acute, for several yards there was hardly more than a few inches separating them. I traveled left, in a path that tunneled into the denser part of the forest. Entering the woods, the swift canopy of leaves and branches dotted with golden sky dotted the wooden pier with flecks of pale sunlight. By the time we had entered the wooded tunnel, the other path was far out of sight. The shadows had become much more pronounced. Objects had not necessarily given up their internal light source, but they had become subordinate to the single obscured sun. It was here that I recall after several minutes something like a wild folk song coming from behind the wall of trees on either side. Sounds of flutes, lyres, percussion, and singing floated on the golden flecks of light. As we walked on, I seemed to begin to glimpse the sound out of the corner of my eye, bright spinning shimmers darting from in between tree trunks and instantly out of sight. I was able to hold on to one with my eyes for a few short seconds, only for it to cave in on itself and scurry back towards its unseen hideout perpetually directly behind me. I called back to it with my memory and tried to focus on its quick and impossible counter-clockwise golden spinning. It was as if the flickering of a thousand precious gems were to lift from their sources into a perpetual tilting somersault of white light. Still replaying the event within my memory I attempted to step forward, but the apparition neither grew closer nor shifted in perspective. It had fixed itself to my eyes rather than I to it. I drew forward again and realized my feet were no longer touching the ground. The pier dropped from beneath me. Distracted I lost focus on the apparition, and in doing so I had no way of knowing whether I was in the present or still within some projection of my memory. The ceiling was now within reach and did not even require straightening my elbow to touch it. As I had suspected its surface was smooth and invisible, with only the appearance of branches, leaves and sky. From beneath I had guessed this but it had been only by intuition. From this vantage point it was not unlike placing ones eye directly level with the curved glass screen of an older television. The image was still in tact, but it became much more difficult to gather its location. The leaves and sky, still alive and fluttering, had aligned themselves with the curvature of the ceiling, which both was and was not, like the scene was being projected from a single point onto the back of a one-sided mirror. Without knowing exactly how I lowered myself towards the pier. I looked and saw no one, so I conjectured I had somehow slipped through a crack into my memory and was traveling in that space rather than the physical space I had purportedly been in, all as if I were in a dream within a dream. Like an astronaut on the moon, I leaped weightlessly along the pier no longer bound by gravity.
Neither flying nor walking, I could not tell how much time had passed since the apparition visited me. The sun stood still in the sky beyond the glass. I leaped effortlessly for miles, brushing the tips of my fingers along the smooth ceiling and lightly sinking down, blood rushing heavily to my face, and then bouncing off the wooden pier like a trampoline, which seemed to bend endlessly into the distance. Gradually it began to veer right, into mystery and eventually back to the pier which had been left behind eons ago.
Until now a sense of time had eluded me. It struck how long it had been since I had seen any of my companions. As I was wondering where I was and where they were, I expected to meet the ceiling I continued rising into what were, as far as I could tell, real branches. The feeling was peculiar and disorienting, like putting ones foot down unexpectedly at the bottom of a staircase anticipiating a step that does not exist. Dizzy, I began to sink and I saw around me the abrupt beginnings of other piers, jutting in various directions from high among the branches. I grabbed hold of one and pulled myself onto it. Peering over the edge my own pier was below, a wavering distant mirage through the gentle flickering of the trees. Still on my hands and knees I turned towards the new pier, seeing it go on, unaware, deep into its own tunnel, that there was ever anything beneath it. Through the cracks in the boards I could see the same golden sea of underbrush, now more shadowed by the sinking sun. The earth felt as solid as it ever had, its firmness incompatible with the dizzying hundreds of feet below and the other piers which began or ended abruptly into the web of branches and leaves. I turned around and began walking along the new pier, until the frightening chasm behind me was no longer in sight.
Above me came distant murmuring voices. I looked up and saw the underside of an octagonal landing, perched by its self high among the branches. I jumped, not sure what to expect, having not explored the ceilings of this tunnel, and was surprised to find my companions, who had taken the other path, sitting on the bench. They were happy, but not surprised, at my arrival. They had learned to jump as I had, and had been leaping from one landing to another and had just stopped to try and discern their location. I told them of the apparition and the chasm of an infinity of tunnels, and we agreed to head back the way they came. We leapt off the landing towards the next one perched a dozen or so yards away. Our feet did not land where we thought they should have. We were on another pier, only this one was knee deep in snow. But the snow was not snow. It was cool, and it did not melt or leave my legs chilled. It was tropical snow. Then I realized I had never left my memory.
"You don't exist, do you?" I said to my friends who were bewilderedly enjoying the strange precipitation much as I had been. They stopped. I realized I had never actually looked directly at them, or even given a thought as to how many of us there were. I had a feeling there were three or four of us, but when I tried to focus on one I found I could not. As long as I accepted I was with company, they seemed undisturbed, quite solid in their own half being. But now out of the woods in this golden-flecked light and warm snow I felt the need to put my finger on them and something undefined resisted. The woods had shrunk away by some strange slight while we were observing the peculiar precipitation, and we were on a submerged pier in a snow covered plain. There was more than two of them and less than four, but their number was neither two, three nor four. Then from behind me I heard someone call my name. The others had arrived. Seeing the faces of the others, bewildered at my realization, they suggested sledding on our bellies. "How many of you are there? Do you have a number?" I shouted. Giggling, they dragged me into the snow and the pier became a slope. At the bottom of the hill I stood up and saw I had come to the end of the snow, which tapered by degrees into the boards of the pier. I stepped onto the planks, the creamy powder falling off my pant legs with each step.
I looked up and I was within the golden light. There were no woods, no golden underbrush, and no sky. The boardwalk, too, was gone. There was only light.
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