The Night's Ledger

When sleep unbars the quiet inward gate,

The mind begins its private theater.

A tide of symbols gathers, intricate,

Each face and place both stranger and familiar.

A falling stair, a door that won’t quite clear,

A childhood road beneath a copper sky—

Such fragments drift where waking thoughts grow thin;

The sleeper asks what meanings linger near.

The old interpreters would calculate

A grammar hidden in the nocturne sphere:

A serpent twined meant danger intimate,

A rising flight foretold the dreamer’s year.

Yet every emblem shifts when hearts appear—

One man sees doom where another learns to fly.

The script is written where the pulses lie;

Each fragment drifts where waking thoughts grow thin.

Through centuries their manuals accumulate—

From temples carved beside Euphrates’ mirror

To couches where the Viennese debate

The wishes veiled behind the mind’s frontier.

But even sages must confess a fear:

No lexicon can wholly justify

Why one small image makes a sleeper cry

While fragments drift where waking thoughts grow thin.

The craft requires a patience delicate:

Attend the tone, the season, and the year.

A river may be grief, or may relate

To simple thirst the daylight left unclear.

The dreamer holds the truest compass here;

Interpretation listens more than why.

Meaning arrives the way the stars draw nigh

When fragments drift where waking thoughts grow thin.

So treat the night’s reports as candidate,

Not verdict carved in marble austere.

The dream’s a riddle written to translate

A life whose daylight words we seldom hear.

Look twice before declaring what is clear—

For certainty is quick to falsify.

The symbols breathe; they live, they multiply

When fragments drift where waking thoughts grow thin.

Reader of sleep, be humble in your spin:

The mind speaks softly under moonlit skin—

Where fragments drift, and waking thoughts grow thin.