At night when I turn out the light, the moon shines through the tall georgian windows and the flowery lace curtains drawn across them. Intricate lace moon-flowers appear on the walls, growing up above my head and across the room through my peripheral vision.

They grow quietly in the lunar light, silently blooming in luxurious shadow. While I am sleeping they are continually growing, feeding on the perfume of my dreams. I wake, steeped in the tincture of my unconscious, to find them looming over me in the middle of the night. Gargantuan flowers waltz on the wallpaper, and I blink and rub my bleary eyes before rolling over again into the darkness.

Again and again I wake halfway and the blooms are there to greet me. I have been reading, I have been dreaming. The lacy moonlight traces an intricate pathway of stems and petals. Somehow, I think, I could travel through my dreams. I could take the last thing I remember and follow it along, like a rope through the dark, icy sea, and place one hand in front of the other until I came to the shore. I could use the light of the moon and the outlines of the petals as a map. A sparkling spiderweb of nocturnal connections.

In the morning the flowers are gone, but certain memories have returned. An essay written in my first year of university (or was it high school?) on The Yellow Wallpaper. Memories (not of my own experience, but rather memories of reading, memories of vicarious dreams) of sleeping on a houseboat, the spirit of the river infusing the night, women living under glass bells of crystalline shadow, women travelling through labryinthian middle eastern streets with kohl on their eyes. My own dreams are hidden, buried beneath a dark blanket of black earth. The bright daylight of forgetfulness has buried the twinkling dreams. I need a map; the ocean is deep.

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