Dreamer meets the dreaming

 Close your eyes. Go on.

Let the black velvet claim you.

See the silent specks, the light's last ghost,

a dust storm dancing on the inner lens.

Jetsam and flotsam,

adrift on the cornea's quiet tide.

A weird interpretation, your brain's first guess

at what randomly triggers a nerve.

A private light show,

a stage only you can see.

But who's the audience?

Remember when you were young?

A child, staring into that shifting void,

those shimmering bits, pure fuel.

Not just dots, but launching pads,

for dragons or new worlds,

spun from pure whim.

Your mind, a puppeteer of shadow plays,

pulling strings only you could feel.

You were in charge of the meaning, then,

inserting your own tales

into the random shimmer.

Later, perhaps, a young adult.

Those same bright motes,

a soothing drift, a steady tide.

No need to make a story, just to breathe,

and let the gentle chaos be.

A calming solace found

in the simple, silent flux.

The mind, watching itself watch,

a soft echo,

the observed becoming the observer's peace.

And now, an older gaze.

Often dismissed, these fleeting shows,

a reflex of the body, nothing more.

But sometimes, still,

you get lost.

Lost in their slow kaleidoscope show.

The lines blur, the layers thin.

This random flitting of light and nerve,

not unlike the creative impulse itself.

Ideas, seemingly born of nothing,

then gelling into an image, a concept, a word.

It is a strange unfolding,

a refolding,

playing out in this awareness loop.

The eye that sees itself seeing,

the mind that thinks its own thoughts,

and in that loop, finds its turning point.

Here, the watcher becomes the show,

the stage and the actor merge.

No grand theater, no singular audience,

just the continuous, recursive hum

of being.

And this hum, this loop, this private dance

of light and thought,

where the given and the chosen entwine,

where meaning is made,

not decreed,

is a tiny eddy in a vaster flow.

For the cosmos, too,

unfolds.

Its grand, indifferent turning mirrors

the quiet, constant making of your mind.

A boundless universe,

and within it,

this boundless, strange, beautiful loop of self.