It's December. Usually, in this part of the world, that means the sun frequents the sky less, the earth gets colder, and the wind blows ice.
This year has been no exception.
This did not stop me from going camping this weekend, however. And it was coooooooooooold. So cold. It was the kind of cold that creeps inside your sweater and buries itself in your bones. It was so cold we shivered like mice and laughed and laughed and laughed as if each howl fanned hot coals in our stomachs to keep us warm.
I slept drowning in a sea of blankets up to my forehead, but every once in a while, I woke up with a sharp gasp for fresh air. The moon was beautiful. It was full and silver and shone like a broach on a navy blue velvet dress of sky. It was like a naked bulb high on the ceiling of a tall tall room. It was a spotlight in an empty theatre where my fellow players were asleep on stage with me. I was the only person alive in a frozen, sleeping world... at least it felt like that.
The moon's pearl glow woke me up, or maybe it was the icy air nipping at my toes, but I had a few minutes of open eyed reflection that night. The most amazing thing happened. I was staring at the sky through the open roof of the tent, the moon following me like a policeman's search light, and the naked branches of the trees above me stretching across my view like saladfingers. But it was the stars I was watching. The stars, which are great to stare at in the middle of dark nights out in places away from city lights, started dancing. Not in the traditional sense, but in the minute or so that I lay there staring, I must have seen fifteen shooting starts zoom past my head.
They were not the first shooting stars I've ever seen, but I certainly had never seen so many. Alone in my frozen dark world I tried to nudge my sleeping neighbors- my man on my right, and my roommate on my left- into waking so they could experience it as well, but as I struggled to open my mouth, nothing came out. Even the act of rolling over and shaking my boyfriend was too much for me, and before I got all the way on my side, I passed out until the morning.
When the sun woke us up the next day, I told my hunny about the shooting stars. "Oh, yeah. I saw them, too," he said, like a shower of flying fireballs raining across the sky is an everyday occurrence for him. For me, though, the fact that he saw them excited me even more than the stars had the night before, because as I was explaining what I saw to him, something dawned on me- I never could have seen the shooting stars. I wasn't wearing glasses in my sleep.
The sky was dark and the the gaseous balls in the sky were bright, but with my poor eyesight and the fact that the nearest one was aprox. 673 trillion miles away, I realized I was probably dreaming.
Which brings me back to my wonderful man's visions- he saw what I saw. So what happened here? Did I feed off his psyche to see with my closed eyes? Was I given sight for two minutes by some greater force than I? Were we both dreaming the same thing? Or is just a case of coincidence, that I dreamt the same thing he saw at the same time?
I may never know.
