The Labyrinth of Dream by Joanne Rixon

The labyrinth of dreams is only accessible on certain days of the year: the middle days
between the signposts of firsts and lasts, of high and low holidays. It cannot be seen at noon or at
midnight, not when the clock is striking at all.

Not everyone can find the doors, let alone walk through them. Not everyone is a
wanderer. A dreamer must be untethered by intense relationships, unweighted by either pleasure
or pain. A dreamer must be light as a feather and as easy to blow in the wind.

When the day is plain and the hour muddled, when the wanderer is abstracted and
bored—the labyrinth doors may sigh and swing ajar, then, and a lone dreamer might turn a
corner in reality and drift inside.

Dreams are slippery, morphous things, and full of shadows. Dreams whisper your name
in the voice your mother spoke with when you were in her womb. Dreams begin with your
heart’s deepest desire, and transform into that which your heart never could desire because it
lacked the sensibility to understand.

The labyrinth goes on for a star’s eon. It is a maze of white-painted hallways, a tomb of
dark stone tunnels, a prank of whispering cornstalks, a status of trimmed boxwood rows. It is
also a wide, borderless plain full of narrow, glassy spires that pierce the upper atmosphere and let
out the air, choking you. And it is an ocean trench where the pressure compresses you into a
diamond and the flash of bioluminescence off your facets attracts the attention of a creature with
eyes the size of mountains. And it is the dark forest full of vines that bind and ooze a sticky sap
that dissolves flesh until you are absorbed by the roots and become one with the ancients.

Thinking tree thoughts is just another branch in the maze. And so is the vertigo from
flying on the back of a giant gull over an ocean the same aquamarine as the sky. And so is the
warmth of the embrace of a lover whose face you do not know and cannot see.

And so is waking, for once inside, a wanderer may half-wake without ever escaping the
maze. The doors to the labyrinth of dreams are difficult to open from any side, and so some
dreamers will always wander, always lost and un-lost, always found and un-found.

END