The Dream Cliffs of Dover

I had a dream last night that I wrote someone I love a letter on the sidewalk in pastel-colored chalk. When I got near the end of the cement slab that made up that section of the walkway I realized that I wasn’t done, that there was still so much more to say. I didn’t have enough room. Sides confined me. I couldn’t write anymore, so I stopped. I dug my slab out from between the two slabs on either side of it with my fingernails and carried it away with me. I forget what it was my dream-self what going to do with this slab. Was I going to send it to the person I wrote it to? Keep it all for myself? I feel like I must have wanted to throw it off the side of the white cliffs of Dover, but I don’t know how to get to Dover (at least not in real-life). Maybe in my dream-life, Dover is just down the street and I go there all the time to read in peace and quiet and write in this journal. Maybe instead of writing in this journal I carve all my secrets into the white, chalk cliffs. I dig my fingernails into the soft rock of those cliffs, just as I dug them in between the sidewalk slabs and out spills the words. No one can ever see them because they are in MY dream-life and no one else knows how to get to MY dream-Dover. And maybe that’s where I got the chalk I used to write a letter to the person I love on the sidewalk slab that I would send or keep or throw over those steep chalk-white cliffs of my dream-Dover down the street and into the sea.

(The drawing is by Charles R. Knight and is titled Dover Cliffs)