Odes to Lucid Dreaming · Track 31 · middle
Counting Fingers in the Bathroom Mirror
The dreamer is awake at 3am — or thinks she is. She walks to the bathroom mirror and counts her fingers in the reflection: she counts seven on the left hand. She counts again: nine. She counts a third time: five, but two of them are not hers. The reality check fails. The mirror is correct; reality is not. She returns to bed and falls asleep into the same room she just left.
Lyrics
[Intro] The time is not a number on a red display. The time is a quality of light against the far wall, a silver bleed from a streetlamp that isn't there. Three seventeen a.m. feels true. My feet are bare on the tile and the tile is a map of a city I've never visited. But I am awake. I am sure of it this time. This is not the other time. [Verse 1] The hallway breathes. I walk to the bathroom mirror, the silver page where my story is indexed. This is the test. The old test. I hold up my left hand to its cold twin. The reflection is clearer than I am. One. Two. The knuckle bends backward. Three. Four. Five. The familiar shape. Six. A new one, branching from the wrist. Seven. A thin, silver wire of a finger. There are seven. [Chorus] The glass is correct. My blood is the error. The reflection is the anchor, and I am the ghost tethered to its silence. The hand in the mirror is the real hand. Its stillness is a judgment. My pulse is a frantic footnote. [Verse 2] I bite my tongue and taste metal and static. I look again. The light bulb flickers into a black sun and back. Now there are nine. The index finger has a joint of polished chrome. The pinky is twice as long as it should be. The new ones are perfect, copied from a book on impossible geometry. I close my eyes, try to rub them, but my hands refuse the command. The third look. Five. Normal. Except the thumb is not mine. The ring finger belongs to a marble statue, cold and without a print. [Bridge] My reflection doesn't breathe. Its eyes are camera lenses, recording my failure. It opens its mouth and a sequence of numbers falls out like dust. 'You are the echo,' it thinks into my head. 'The memory of the person who went to sleep.' Through the glass, I see the bedroom door behind me. It's the right door, but the wood grain is moving. It scrolls downward like text on a screen. [Outro] I surrender. I turn from the honest mirror. I walk back to the bed that is waiting for itself. The sheets are cool, printed with the pattern of the tile from the bathroom floor. A recursive map. I lie down in the room I just left, close the eyes that are not mine. I fall asleep into this exact same waking.