that dream

I'm climbing a tattered staircase of pale-yellow and white frosting. The angles and spaces expand and contract as I turn and face my surroundings. I am instantly unalone somehow. It's a rigid staircase that resembles my own, but bare of carpet and shoe-prints. A dim, sweet light, as dim and sweet as the sins of the night, joins me as I ascend. From my eyes I sense a large hole to the left of me where a circle of wall should be. I press into it, but it does not admit me. All okay, I continue and feel the top beneath me, making my head a new height reached in this dark room filled with sweet things I cannot yet see. My sweet mind, where have you led me? Dear me, there's a hall to the left, like my home's own. I follow its tiles and poke my arms awake. Colors blend into patterns crooked and plump. There's a wall with a shape of a door with an arch that divides itself into little bricks. I press it, it feels, I enter it whole. I am led by some unknown force down a wide hall of rich color masked in flickering chandelier. There are the portraits on the wall of any castle cliche, moving and guarding my dreaming self with their fixed eyes. A steady pace is inevitible in this place. I am Alice, or something entirely new and independent of her. No, there is no name yet for my phenomena. The smell of incense with no smoke overwhelms me in a place where my dreams are worth fifty cents.