Gorillas

In the dream I fall asleep again, and in the dream inside the dream someone hands me a cup of something that tastes like starlight. The first gorilla arrives in a magician’s top hat, its red band circling his crown like a ring of fire. He’s snarling, but it isn’t anger; it’s the sound the universe made when it began. Look closer at his green beard: a double helix runs right down the middle. He wears his DNA on the outside. The message lands like warm rain: you are the spell, and the hat is just where you keep it.

This one wears a tower of colour, red, yellow, green and magenta stacked like energy centres climbing toward the sky. His gold teeth glitter: he has chewed on hard truths and turned them into treasure, the way the old alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold. And the lavender beard is full of blue rivers branching downward like roots. Now I see it. Every gorilla is a tree planted upside down, roots in the sky, drinking from heaven and pouring it down into the forest.

Same lavender roots, same golden grin, but he has traded the tall hat for a soft blue beanie, and it’s so humble I tear up a little. He’s the monk of the troop. The stripes wrap his head like prayer beads, round and round, each stripe a breath in, each gap a breath out. He doesn’t need to be tall to touch the sky; the sky comes down and curls up on his head like a friendly cat. Stay warm, he tells me without moving his mouth. Enlightenment is mostly staying warm and being kind.

A black top hat again, but beneath it a band of blue water ripples across his brow, a little river of thought flowing right over his third eye. His beard is lagoon turquoise, and two white shapes pour down through it like waterfalls, or melting candles, or the tusks of an ancestor he met in another life. Time is melting off his chin, I realise. He has already lived all of it. The gold in his teeth is just the sunlight he saved from every morning he ever saw.

He’s roaring, mouth wide, every tooth white as a snow peak, under the tall striped hat of celebration. The roar isn’t a warning. It’s a laugh so big it comes out as thunder, and deep in the dream I understand that joy is the loudest prayer there is. Down through his turquoise beard the white waterfalls keep falling, washing every worry downstream. I roar back. It feels incredible. The whole jungle roars with us, and somewhere far below, a seed cracks open.

A blue beanie, a green brow crested with a white wave like breaking surf, and a mouth open in a cry I can feel in my ribs. He is the guardian of the threshold, standing in the doorway between the waking world and this one. The wave on his brow is the edge of the ocean of consciousness, always breaking, always new. He lets no one through who is carrying fear. I check my pockets: empty. He nods, and the door behind him opens onto a forest made entirely of light.

No hat at all. Just an olive brow, heavy and soft as moss, a golden grin, and the turquoise beard with its white falls. He’s the one who took everything off: the crown, the costume, the name. What’s left is the face we all wear under our hats, ancient and grey and grinning. The less you wear, the dream whispers, the more of the sky can reach you. His bare head shines like the moon, and I take off my own hat, even though I wasn’t wearing one.

A glowing blue band wraps his forehead, a wave drawn through it like a line of sound, a frequency, the hum at the centre of everything. He’s tuned in. His mouth stretches open on one long note and I swear I can hear it, low and endless, the note whales sing and mountains hum when no one is listening. The blue rivers in his lavender beard pulse in time. Gorillas are the tuning forks of the forest, I realise. Strike one and the whole planet rings.

Blue beanie, mossy brow, golden teeth, and there it is again: the green beard with the helix spiralling down its centre. We share almost all of our DNA with gorillas, the dream reminds me, so this face is a family portrait. He is the cousin who stayed in the forest so someone would remember the way back. The helix twists like a ladder and I start climbing it, down through grandmothers and great-great-grandfathers, until I’m a gorilla too, sitting in the sun, completely content.

The rainbow tower hat, the golden grin, the green beard with the spiral of life running through it. This is the elder, the silverback of the dream. Every colour on his hat is a season he has walked through and survived. The helix says he carries all of us inside him; the gold says he has learned to smile at the hard parts. He doesn’t speak, because silverbacks never need to. He just looks at me, and suddenly I know I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Horns! Two neon-green horns curve up from his head like lightning bolts reaching for each other, a crescent moon cradling the night, an antenna tuned to the stars. Beneath them a blue wave rolls across his brow, and his beard is plain warm brown, the colour of soil, the colour of home. He’s the shaman of the troop: rooted in the earth below, wired to the heavens above, grinning gold in between. Heaven and earth meet in his face and shake hands.

The last gorilla is the simplest: no hat, no horns, no rivers, no helix. Just a brown brow, a brown beard and a golden smile. This is the one that wakes me, gently, from both dreams at once, because this is the truth under all the costumes: a living creature, warm and wild, who belongs to the forest and to us and to the future. Protect him. Protect them all. I open my eyes with my heart full and ringing, and the whole day looks like a gift.