Coral Dreams

2025

Coral Dreams is what the Underwater Era sees when it sleeps. The reef-minds let go of their structure for a few hours and drift — half-formed sovereigns, slime-bodied predators, soft electric tendrils — none of them strictly real, none of them entirely metaphors.

Everything here is provisional. A creature might be a face for a moment and then loosen back into colour and texture. The project keeps only the instants where the dream held a shape long enough to be looked at.

cloud oni — An oni shaped briefly out of a passing cloud. The dream did not know it wanted an oni until the shape was already there; once recognised, it began to drift apart faster than the rest of the weather, the way names tend to dissolve when said aloud in sleep. Caught here mid-dissolution, more or less politely.

crimson maw — A maw still glowing from something half-eaten. The dream has been polite about the details — no body is shown, no struggle — but the colour at the lips is too saturated to be metaphor. Whatever it was, it was warm before, and the dream has chosen not to specify what it became after.

crowned sovereign — Sovereign of a dream that lasted nine seconds. In that time an entire court was implied, taxes were briefly considered, and a small coastal city remembered to be afraid. Then the dream moved on and the sovereign with it. The crown remained in the room slightly longer, out of habit.

electric gaze — A gaze with a low electric current running quietly behind it. The eyes hum at a frequency the rest of the face has not decided to acknowledge; in waking life this would be alarming, but in a dream it just keeps the figure interesting, the way a slight rattle keeps you watching an appliance you cannot quite identify.

ember slumber — A slumber kept warm by a buried ember. The body has gone into the kind of deep, slow sleep that produces weather, and the surroundings have started running a low sympathetic fever — the dream's heating system is somewhere down here too, and it has been left on for the comfort of whatever else might pass through.

ethereal gaze — A look from a face that hasn't fully formed. The dream has roughed in the eyes, started on a jaw, lost interest. What remains is the gaze, sharper than the face that holds it, the way the smell of a meal can outlast the meal itself. The figure does not know yet that it is incomplete, and never will.

lime tendrils — Tendrils tasting the edges of the dream — the part where the imagery loses confidence and starts to repeat itself. They pick at the seam without urgency; the dream has another seam ready on the other side, and the tendrils know it the way old houseplants know when they will be watered.

moss spirit — A spirit that drifted in from a nearby era. It is not native to this dream, which is why it looks slightly off-register — like a guest at a wedding who arrived a generation early. Nobody is going to ask it to leave; in this layer of the world, hospitality is the same as gravity.

neon slime — Slime that learned to imitate a signal. In the dream's dim back-rooms it pulses in shapes that almost form words; in the morning, the dreamer remembers the rhythm but not the meaning. This is normal, and the slime would prefer it not be looked into any further.

spiked guardian — A guardian standing at the edge of the dream, where the imagery thins out into the next sleeper's territory. The spikes are not for defending the sleeper — they are for the dream itself, which is the more vulnerable of the two parties, and which prefers not to be observed too directly during its more formative hours.