dreamSCAPE

Collaboration between The Stranger and Damien

May 26, 2026

Not everyone arrives at sleep the same way. Some fall. Some fight. Some drown getting there.

Damien and The Stranger will take you for a poetic escape through the land of dreams.

Close your eyes. Now try to stay there.

Reading this reminded me of those nights when sleep feels like a country you’ve misplaced the map to and the more you search for it, the further away it seems, yet when it finally arrives, it opens into landscapes far stranger and more expansive than the waking world ever allows. I adored the way this moved between frustration and wonder. Highly recommend a read.
- Salt & Pomegranate

Damien (regular, to the left) / The Stranger (italic, center)

There’s this space between the ability to sleep.
To dream, to see the things we long to see when our eyes close.
Oftentimes, there’s a battle between awake and asleep.
How do we fight the inability to dream when our minds hold us awake?
Sometimes, it’s not our choice, and we’re at the mercy of the spiral.

Miserable existence,
Lack of subsistence,

Long dark hours of night,
No one within sight,
No hope, just freight.

Sleep is giving me
The silent treatment,
punishing me.

I’m grounded,
Denied the embarkment
To the departing ship,

What an embarrassment.

I swim faster and faster,
Until I’m on board.

The ground is my bedding,
The sky, my blanket.

Slowly, I sink into a slumber I’ve been awaiting
Negating the waking hours
My mind slips under, sedating
I’m wading in worlds and realms
Closed eyes held by the worlds I helm
Captain of the ship
Take the trip, I make the drift
Sifted sands and
strands of infinite loops
playing over and over in my mind
on this stoop
there’s only forward, no rewind
designed by divine intervention
intention has become
dreamed convention
an invention of subconscious

The ocean’s wonders,
The subconscious.

Further beyond, I look.
The distant horizon, I grab.
My gaze pierces it.

A tiny island lies ahead —
Is it awake?
Maybe still conscious?

My gaze sliding,
Rainbow fish walking,
In the ocean, gliding.

The stars drop,
Dive into its depth.

The sun laughs,
When all of a sudden,
The moon steals
Its shining light.

The angry sun
Takes it back.

Infinite loops of theft,
Solar and lunar eclipse.

Imminent apocalypse.

Spiraling, I lay still
seemingly unconscious
But I’ve got this
let it play how it plays
let me lay where I lay
One day this simple scene
will somehow compete
outside this dream
as the loop speeds
I feel this need
to wake, for responsibility
But I stay
for now

A dream transcends realities, worlds, and timelines. It’s where the conscious mind and the magical subconscious shake hands to weave unimaginable universes. No laws exist, only patterns and clues from the subconscious. A dream is a portal into unlimited archives of collective knowledge.

In other words,

Time Travel!

THE END

Writing is not what I do — it is what I chose over everything else. It is not a hobby, but rather a choice I make every day — to write instead, to stay here, to keep going. If these words have been worth your time, perhaps they are worth a quiet coffee too. Every contribution is not just support — it is permission for the next poem to exist.

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