The Dream Bubble

The Bumber was playing with words again. In the same treehouse, perched unprecariously on the very edge of time and no time. The play would pause when he felt like having a rest, and then he would press a button in his mind and the words would spring into life from the inner realm of his thoughts. Life, he wondered, life as I know it…is it like a bubble in a dream—or like a dream in a bubble?

The same button was pressed when he wanted to stop the thoughts from forming words, and he stopped for a while, reentering the formless silence in order to go deeper, to find an answer.

As no wind whistled around his ears, the stillness of the silence and the absence of any thought motions could not produce an immediate answer to any question, let alone the puzzling one he had asked himself, but before he knew it, though it was not before anything, the button clicked itself into action, and he had begun to think again.

The enchanted being, being not entirely human, was only partly surprised—the human part--but he knew from experience that the timeless still silence was beyond any need for either questions or answers, and there on the very edge, that very same pause had been, in some enchanted way, the answer to his question.

No answer necessary, he mused in amusement, the question and the answer are one and the same! Fascinating, a dream in a bubble, a bubble in a dream…they are both, as they are, aren't they? He was playing again.

His human part took the reins, shuffling his half transparent form a little, to get comfortable. The sensation was felt as wind blowing against a face it was very pleased to feel now, a face that could identify him on the surface world of human life as a separate person, though he knew in his depths that it was only a mask, but a good one just the same. It rubbed his chin, and there was stubble, a little rough, he thought, so maybe I will leave it to grow, like things do on the surface, a nice smooth beard!

The rogue button clicked itself off again before he could decide, and a deeper awareness took over from the chattering mindstream on the surface. It could not be described, as it was indescribable, but for the sake of trying, maybe it was something like…pure bliss and complete ecstasy rolled into one. No human time, no doing, just the joy of Being--the greater part of every Bumber--bathed in a kind of light that had no form, like the emptiness of space, though even that he could see was not really empty, but full of potential, and that, as all Bumbers know, is the power of life itself.

The dream bubble continued to rotate in some strange dimension. It was not alone, as a whole bubble universe had been dreamed into life by maybe the "dreamer of all dreamers that dream dreams". There were countless bubbles in endless space and unlimited arrays of dreamers dreaming up stuff, but within one particular dream was the Bumber's bubble, or perhaps his dream, or both. The button clicked again. Must fix that. The Bumber had not been anywhere, but was back.

Was it time for a reality shift? Bumber looked outward, and listened inward. The treehouse was still, silent, supported by what seemed like solid oak born some centuries before, and the little structure he called home was perched there aloft, with none but branches and leaves around him, pointing to the sky above.

What is the sky anyway? He was still looking outwards when the question popped up on the screen of his mind, but it was the repeat of a question he had already received answers to over and over. The answers seemed to come in variations of the same thing, though he knew them not as things but as an ever deepening awareness that has no man-made words to adequately describe it. They could only point someone to an answer, and the Bumber, as a 'not entirely someone' in the human sense, picked up the threads deeper each time he asked the question. He would press reverse more often than not, and listen outward ever more deeply, listening to his own voice, and also the sound of all the voices he knew, and ever deeper to the voices he did not know, as all voices could appear there on the very edge of time and a deeper reality, balanced unprecariously between truth and fiction, between the answer…and the question.

The answer in his current reality appeared as an unformed crystal, and he converted it into words, he spoke them in an enchanted whisper to himself.

"First it's a mere concept, the sky then is a doorway--a thought form that dissolves only to leave what is really there above, just the fullness of endless empty space!"

The enchanted tree dweller laughed at his paradox and continued...timeless, formless…yet filled with so much…He stopped abruptly.

Something was shaking the treehouse, an invisible force he could not immediately recognise; not a windstorm, earthquake or anything he had experienced before, it was a different sensation altogether. The treehouse now seemed precarious on its perch, and the Bumber felt something pulling at its foundations, as if to challenge his own position, it was uncomfortable, and a little voice screamed out inside him. Is it a nightmare approaching in a dream…or a bubble about to burst? the Bumber considered the dilemma. He had to be sure before he took action, but he soon realised it was only a problem for the not entirely human part to tackle, as the enchanted, being basically formless, could not be shaken by any force that any dreamer or bubble burster could dream up. Who is that screamer, Bumber asked, and what is all the fuss about? The little voice that had screamed out answered immediately from within the Bumber's not entirely human head, and it knew now why the treehouse was shaking and even why the invisible force had tried to get its attention.

Unshakability, a natural state for an enchanted being, had been momentarily tested, admittedly in the same moment there always is on the very edge between the timeless and "time that appears to pass," by an invisible force that exploded into being in some distant corner of the Bumber's not entirely human mind. The explosion had occurred within a question, somewhere between the bubble in a dream or the dream in a bubble--and the fallout had shaken the treehouse just to draw his attention, nothing more, to the fact that a paradox does not require to be one or the other. It is both, at both the same, and infinitely different times.

The treehouse was again as unshakable as forever, and the enchanted being was now bathed in silent sunlight, from which an infinite array of earthly sounds emerged. They together conspired to produce another explosion of an entirely different nature. An invisible force released from the timeless into the dream bubble and made the big little world inside it go round and round in circles and spirals, and even created a most delightful illusion of solid forms for the enchanted ones to play with,  in "the time that passes", a dreamtime that all dreamers dream their dreams in, and in the very same bubble that might be no more or no less than the same enchanted dreamsphere…hurtling through space-time, spinning endlessly on.

Louis Cennamo is a retired pro musician, poet/creative writer and holistic healer. He has a wealth of life experience in these fields that colours his creative writing—mostly in the form of metaphysically themed short stories. Ten of which have been published since he began submitting them two years ago. His poetry is also mainly esoteric and intuitive, sometimes dream-like and meditative, emanating from the still silence always there,  in the space between each word.