last night.

last night i dreamed that i was in a friends sunny new  house. while wandering around i found myself descending into a subterranean room. it was half brick cathedral, half cavern. it smelled like wet earth and something else. a trace of oil paint or turpentine. it was well lit for a cathedral-cave, the walls glowed amber and even the farthest reaches of the ceiling were visible. as i walked around i started to notice hundreds of tiny brightly colored birds nesting like swallows up in the high cracks and nooks in the walls of mud and stone and brick. hundreds of bright red yellow and blue birds about the size of bottlecaps flew in groups of their own color around the space. when i came up close to one of the nests i realized that they were teaching the fledglings how to fly. but most of them were failing. they fell in bright dashes, splatting like paint all around my feet. exactly like globs of paint flung from a brush. it was horrifically tragic, the sounds of tiny primary colored birds splatting all around and me trying to scoop them up and smearing them in my hands as i tried to help. suddenly, as i was on my knees wailing and frantically smearing paint bird guts everywhere, my fifth grade science teacher appeared with a class in tow. they were making colorful bar graphs recording the survival rates of each group of fledglings. i forget which group was the most successful, the red or yellow or blue. mr. davis, in his white lab coat now streaked with primary colors, told that i was being completely irrational, that this was how nature worked, they had hundreds of offspring for this very reason, and that being kind never helped anyone figure out the complex miracle of flight.