I dreamt the strongest dream last night. I found myself in a dark grey room with walls so far apart I couldn’t see them. The ceiling was beyond sight, too, but I somehow knew it was there. There was very little light, and it, too, seemed greyish. I could only see the area directly in front of wherever I was looking. It was very much like wearing a bike helmet lamp on a cloudy, moonless night. Everywhere I turned my head I found ends of string tied to somewhere past the reach of the light. There were all sorts. Some were like yarn, fuzzy and brightly colored. Some looked like kite string and others like package twine. There were even thin, frayed ones that looked like used dental floss. A few strings appeared to be fine gold.

 

For some reason, I took it upon myself to try to tie them together, each to another’s end, one at a time. Each time I knotted two strings’ ends, they would pull tight and begin to resonate like a plucked bass string. The room would brighten. That’s cool, I dream-thought. I quickened my pace.

 

Many strings were pretty simple to tie. My hands adeptly took the ends and rolled them together into some well-practiced knot that would be impossible to remember and replicate in the awake world. A few of the strings felt like they jumped from my hands and tied themselves together, almost as if they had waited their entire existence to entwine with each other and were excited to have the chance to do so. There were a few knots that didn’t come together quite so easily. One would feel like rebar and refuse to budge. I’d have to spend time with it and really lean into it with all my weight to get it to loop with another string end. A couple of strings unraveled again and again, but persistent retying prevailed. Still a few others seemed too short to reach each other, but I would tug and tug until the coupling could happen. String pairings ranged wildly. There were the unlikely, such as a bit that looked like fine silk clumsily tied to one that looked like a trash-bag tie, and there were the ones that seemed logical, like ones that looked like electrical wire that tied together in what seemed to be a solder joint.

 

The room brightened to an oscillating green and a sound emerged from the vibrating connections. Some strings thrashed about alone, and it hurt to look at them. Others merged together into huge ropelike segments only to unravel further down their length. I looked down at my hands. They were growing wrinkled and pale. The nails were splitting and chipping. Blue veins stood out, and on the backs of my hands liver spots sprang up to spite me. I gritted what was left of my teeth and hastened my duties.     

 

My work seemed almost complete as the room radiated so intensely I could only peek at my knots through clenched eyelashes. The glorious sound grew so deafening that my ears just shut down, but the air pressure from the vibration was strong enough to pummel my guts. I felt my breath give, my knees let go, and I was falling.

 

Luckily, my brain refused to leave me to such a fate and switched me to a safer dream. I became a monster truck named Tornado, but everyone called me the more redneck sounding ‘Nadar. I was laser blue with lime green racing stripes. My cartoonishly large tires were a ridiculous tangerine and I had Barney-purple mud flaps with a silver silhouette of a crowing rooster on each. I’m pretty certain my back window had a sticker of Calvin peeing on something. The rest of my night I spent doing titanic donuts and rooster-tailing colossal amounts of gravel.