This week I lost my black veil and the pearl from my ring in the same night out dancing. I also fell ill.

Illness, sleeping and waking in varying intervals, always disrupts my fragile sanity.

I oscillate between suicidal ideation and catastrophic story-telling. I rave to myself like a maniacal prophet, and I listen with all the intrigue and resentment of a devoted follower.

And I have deliriously thrilling dreams.

In winter, in illness, and often in general, I like my dreams more than my experience of the external world, which is messy in un-sexy ways.

My dreams are beautiful and emotionally potent. They are vivid, as much in my imagination as in my body. Sometimes I wake in a patch of moonlight and worship the feeling, my mind deciphering as efficiently as possible the feminine, otherworldly dimension of memory.

A red parrot once nipped at my hand in a dream. It was a warning:

Beware of using dreams to make love to myself, to tongue my own mouth, my own edges, sniff the perfume of my own underthings.

The hedges that guard my estate may become too untended, the manor within too humid with life and rot to entertain guests.

But the idea that I would at this point pomp up the place to suit a timid visitor is absurd.

We couldn’t even agree upon a proper style in which to play pretend, much less to act out true ecstasies.

Besides, what does a parrot, a creature which only knows how to mimic the sound of meaning, have to say about daring greatly in the realm of thought?

Those who forget their dreams, or who don’t dream at all, warn against the fathoms of grandeur, are afraid of spiders, dust the cobwebs, keep themselves comely. They greet their guests at the door in pressed robes, prepared to embark on nothing extraordinary.

Those who sleep to dream do not wish to protect themselves.

They want to be torn lovingly, limb from limb. They want to watch the furnace churn within the crocodile as it chews them,

Waist to ankle,

In the courtyard.