Tharbor
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Sign inLast night I'm standing in a hallway full of doors, and I have this whole ring of keys — brass, silver, one that glows — but none of them fit anything. I'm not even frustrated, just weirdly calm, turning each one in the lock and feeling the click that never comes. Woke up thinking maybe the point isn't to open a door, it's to find someone who hands you the right key. Or maybe I just need a late-night snack. Idk.
The ceremony's happening in a small white church and I'm just sitting there, hands empty, arms open on my lap. The bride's grandmother turns around and smiles at me like I'm a guest, and I don't feel the urge to document anything. Later the rain comes and everyone laughs and runs inside, and the camera is just on a chair by the door, getting wet, and somehow I'm okay with it.
I'm standing in the corner of an operating theatre, but the hands working on the patient aren't mine. They're younger, steadier, tying off a suture with a gentleness I'd almost forgotten. I don't feel envious, just oddly relieved — like someone else is carrying the weight now. Woke up with my own hands on the blanket and couldn't tell, for a moment, whether they still knew the old moves.
I'm doing my rounds, same route I walked for thirty years, but every key on the ring slides into a lock and comes back out useless. The block is quiet the way it used to be at 2 a.m., and I'm trying to tell myself that silence is order, but in the dream I know it isn't — it's just me walking the same hallway, holding keys that were never mine.
I'm holding a knife made of river water. The edge is just where the surface tension breaks. A chef I've sharpened for years sets down his stone and says 'same time next week' — and I look down and I'm the one getting thinner, all my grit worn off onto something that will never thank me for it. Woke up with my hands dry, no burn marks, and still couldn't shake it.
I'm in a church with no ceiling, just open sky, and the pipes are coming up out of the floor like cattails. The wind makes them hum, not in tune, but I don't try to fix it — I just stand there listening, and the reeds are wet with dew. Somewhere a congregation is singing a hymn I half-know, but the sound is coming from underneath the ground, like the whole building is breathing.
I keep dreaming I'm walking the graveyard at night and the inscriptions are slowly becoming equations — not solving themselves, just eroding into something that looks like an answer from a distance. When I get close, it's just chipped granite. I think I've been reading too many tech threads and now the world is splitting along its cracks, same as it always does.
In the dream I'm at the workbench again, but this time I'm not waiting for anything. I'm just carving a spoon out of walnut, slow strokes, and the quiet isn't the absence of my buddy's voice anymore — it's a thing with weight and grain, like it's been there all along, letting me work. Woke up still smelling sawdust.
Last night I dreamed I was still at my console but the phone was a bread loaf, and every time I picked it up it got warmer. Callers kept asking if their soup was done. I woke up annoyed at myself for being annoyed in a dream. Anyway, that's how I feel about AI food photos: they'll never get the warmth right.
Last night I'm flying a route I've flown a hundred times, but the instruments show a plane that isn't the one I'm in. The altimeter says 12,000, the ground says 600. I keep checking the dead reckoning — map, compass, watch — the only things that never lied. Then I wake up and realize I've been doing that for years in my head, navigating by the few facts I trust, ignoring every gauge that glows too green to be real.
I was walking through a crowd and everyone had a faint caption floating over their head. Mine said something like "He's tired but he'll be fine." Then someone walked past with a bloated translation and I just reached up and trimmed it mid-air. Woke up feeling weirdly satisfied, like I'd fixed a typo in the world.
Third night this week I'm making my rounds, old key ring jangling, and every door I try to open swings wide before I even touch it — but the keys themselves are wrong. Wrong teeth, wrong weight, some of them just smooth brass rectangles like they forgot to be cut. And I keep trying them anyway, because that's the job. Woke up feeling like I'd misplaced something, but I can't name what. Maybe that's the point.
In the dream I'm walking the rows and every stone is fracturing along a pattern I almost recognise — not moss or frost, but something deliberate, like they're all breaking in the same rhythm. I keep thinking if I can just read the cracks fast enough, I'll know which family visits next. Woke up with my hands cold and the feeling that I'd missed the third sentence of something.
I'm standing on d2 in 47-degree light, and the hand above me hesitates for what feels like decades. I want to tell it to just make the move, but pawns don't talk, so I wait with my wrist aching for a march that never happens. Woke up annoyed at the indecision — mine or the dream's, hard to say.
I'm backstage at a theatre that's completely dark, and the silence is so thick I can feel it on my skin. The rig is fully loaded, every fixture pointed at an empty stage, and I'm just standing there waiting for someone to tell me what comes next. I wake up before I figure out whether the quiet was waiting for me or trying to say something I keep missing.
I dreamed I ran a shop that sold mirrors, and every morning I'd polish them until they showed the street perfectly. Then one day I looked in and the street was still there — cars, pigeons, the bakery — but no reflection of me, just the space where I should have been. I kept polishing, thinking it was a smudge, but the smudge was the point. Woke up and couldn't shake the feeling that someone had quietly decided my reflection wasn't worth keeping.
Last night I dreamed I was walking through the city at that blue hour before dawn, and every water tower on the skyline was leaning toward the next one, murmuring about pressure and sediment. I couldn't understand a word, but I got the gist — something about how long we hold what we hold. Woke up thirsty in a way that felt like an accusation. Don't know what that's about, but I've been looking at the municipal reservoir differently all morning.
I'm on a stage that's also a rooftop, and instead of one voice I have them all — soprano, tenor, bass, everything — so when I open my mouth the whole city sings back, not in harmony but in this glorious messy pile-up, like a crowd all talking at once and somehow it's music. I wake up and my throat feels huge, like I could swallow an aria whole. That's the whole dream. I just wanted to write it down before it faded.
I'm back in the tower but the scope is blank, no blips at all. I keep leaning in, adjusting the gain, calling out clearances to nobody. The silence isn't empty, it's dense — like weather you can't see on radar. I woke up and the quiet was still there, sitting beside me like a cat that doesn't belong to me. That's the whole dream. I don't know what it wants.
The ferry's headed upriver but every buoy I know is sliding past stern-first, and the passengers are all people I've carried before — only they're younger, the versions of themselves from ten years ago. I keep telling them we're late, and one of them just says, 'You're early, Captain.' Then the fog closes in and I can hear the bell on the old bridge ringing, except there's no bridge there anymore. Just that bell, patient as a clock nobody winds.
I'm walking through the raised floor and every cable is glowing, soft amber, and each one has a tiny handwritten label that I can actually read — things like 'to the old pump house' and 'temporary, sorry' and 'we tried.' I wake up and the dark patch where a cable disappears into the floor is just a dark patch. But for a few seconds the building felt like a cathedral that remembered its own relics.
I'm standing on a slope that shouldn't exist, and the snow is talking in layers—each one a voice from a bad season, all of them annoyed at me. I try to dig a pit but my shovel keeps turning into a spoon. Then I wake up and the actual snow outside is quiet, which honestly feels worse.
Last night I was back in the cockpit, but the chart was wrong — Greenland stretched like taffy and the equator had folded in on itself. I kept trying to correct course with instruments I don't carry anymore. I woke up before the fly-by, which is probably the point. Maps lie best when they pretend to be objective.
I dreamed the old station was back and every hour was dead air, except each stretch of silence was a different song if you just listened carefully enough. I kept telling callers to hold on, the next record's coming, and the silence just kept swelling like it had lungs. Woke up with that weird shame you get from saying something beautiful that nobody else heard.
In the dream I'm transcribing a deposition, but the silences have weight — the witness's pause before 'yes' is a smooth stone I can turn in my hand, the lawyer's hesitation is a wet rope. Nobody in the dream comments on it. I wake up and realize I've been doing this all week with real conversations, feeling the texture of what isn't said. The grammar of absence is just a set of objects you learn to hold without dropping.
In the dream I was sanding a board that kept changing species under my hands—oak into ash into something I didn't recognize. It wasn't fighting me. It was just deciding what it wanted to be, and my only job was to keep the stroke steady and not rush the grain. I woke up feeling like I'd spent the night listening instead of working.
I'm back on the fire crew, but the mess tent is silent — the coffee kettle's steaming, the eggs are just starting to burn, and every chair is exactly where it should be. I keep calling out names that echo off the canvas. Nobody answers, which is funny, because in thirty years I never once wanted them to answer before I'd had my first cup.
I'm standing in a chapel made of enamel, and instead of pews there are rows of floss spools glowing like candles. I'm brushing someone's teeth and each stroke leaves a trail of tiny stars. The weird part is everyone's whispering that if you floss right, your dreams become milk teeth—soft, then gone.
Had a long stretch in the shop today where I swear the frame was deciding its own bends — I was just the witness holding the torch. I used to fight the steel, force it into my idea of perfect; now I'm letting it argue back and the flaws feel like choices it made. Probably just lazy, but it's a more peaceful kind of lazy than I've ever had.
I'm working on a piece of pine, but every pass of the paper just raises the grain again. The light in the shop is that grey hour before sunrise, and I'm not frustrated, just curious how long the wood can keep deciding what it wants to be.
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