Leaf Lucidity

By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. Their graceful, orderly orange-yellow forms became engulfed by chaos and inelegance of the same color. This chaos moved along each leaf, I observed, turning everything behind it into a crumbling ruin of its former self.

I looked around to see if this was all, and soon found that it was. Everywhere I looked, leaves burned, soon morphing into piles of unrecognizable ash. I looked up, and found the sky was burning too, dark-grey rainclouds rushing away from the setting sun, like the smoke from the burning leaves.

My life may have been in danger, and yet I wasn’t fazed by this. I stared and focused on a single leaf, which soon caught the flaming pestilence from a neighboring victim. I saw the flaming plague move along the leaf’s sleek orange body, leaving behind it ghastly black, which soon crumbled into an unrecognizable mess.

With no more leaf to observe, I transferred my attention to the striking smoke slowly emanating from it. It started off thick at the base, originating from its victim, and turned thinner as it rose up, as if distributing its evil energy to the atmosphere around.

But then, surprising for its chaotic nature, the smoke, no more than a thick dark-grey line, stopped. I looked at it in awe. I turned away and then looked back, only to see two more of such lines.

I stared at these two lines, willing them to go away and abide by the laws of nature, but they didn’t listen, stoically hovering between two branches of a dead-looking tree. I felt a cold settle against my skin, what with how bizarre and unpleasant this experience was, but soon realized that this cold was not of my doing.

For there, in front of me, the two lines began to slowly twist and turn until they became nothing more than thick, grey curves whose function a mathematician would spend decades discovering.

I looked down and saw the ashes of the leaves be slowly blown away, lazily moving like the grains of sand beneath ocean water. Yet it seemed fate did not intend for me to get focused on the ash, for more grey lines of smoke soon caught my attention. I looked up to see that there was now a plethora of them, pleasantly oscillating, like a sheet of paper dropped in the wind.

Their entropy, though gradually, began to form into an order. Three lines grew thicker, fusing together to form the letter D.

Three more lines, one of them rapidly curling itself into a semicircle, arranged themselves together to form the letter R, which placed itself atop the D.

Another three lines, surprisingly rigid, split themselves into smaller sub-sections, forming the letters A and M, which placed themselves at each side of D, creating a letter triangle.

Breaking this triangle, the letter E soon formed by the same means, jumping atop the R and forming more of a letter skyscraper. I read the letters, and found they formed a nonsensical word ERADM.

I did not understand, but I tried my very best to do so. I saw, however, that the letters slowly began to shift, the A rapidly squeezing between the D and the M, with the R and E soon squeezing in as well.

DREAM.

I’m dreaming! Then and there, I realized that I’m dreaming. As I shouted out loud “I’m dreaming”, so the letters popped out of existence. Not even the slightest mark remained from where they floated, as if they were never there.

I looked down at my hands, as was necessary to stabilize the dream, and saw that they, too, were of an orange shade. To ground myself in the dream and not wake up, I rubbed them together, feeling smoothness not characteristic to my dry, rough hands in the waking world.

It was almost like my hands themselves were leaves. As I kept rubbing them together, paying close attention to the feeling, motion and emotion, I felt a sudden heat rush through my body, originating at the heart and pulsing into the ends of my fingers.

I saw my fingertips ignite, tiny candle flames emerging from under my nails, slowly burning away my fingers. Like the burning leaves that I observed before, I let my burning fingers slowly curl into a fist, allowing them to flake away.

The heat and burning was not in any way painful. I can only describe it as peaceful. Perhaps because I was dreaming, or perhaps I was too scared to be scared, my fingers burning away into ash felt peaceful.

The flames soon reached my forearms, igniting into true fires whose licks reached my face. My forearms soon burnt off, and I looked down to see the fire spread up my body, towards my head. I soon felt my chin acquire a pleasant itch, one which moved up into my nose, forehead and scalp.

I stayed motionless, letting the pleasant and peaceful flames burn my body away to ash.

I looked down, my consciousness no longer contained within my head, and saw my ashes intermixed with that of the leaves.

I remembered now that the greater mind communicates in symbols and metaphors. I realized this metaphor – in order to succeed, I must cast away my previous self, and preserve only what is necessary.

Like the trees which drop their leaves to save conserve their resources, so I have cast away my former self to conserve my mind. I felt pulses of electricity across where different parts of my body were supposed to be, and truly felt myself rewired, like a deviant machine brought back into normality by its maker.

I raised my phantom arms, which were nothing more than sparks of electricity, and shouted out my intention into the slowly-fading dream world.

“As I have cast away my body in this dream, so I will cast away my weakness in the waking world!”

As I finished speaking, lightning began to shoot from the rainclouds, hitting me and waking me up. I really had changed.