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The fire of dawn snaps Dawn awake from her dreaming.

“No flight, no totems, no tree, who was I?” Dawn asks herself. “Was that me? Luci?” Dawn blinked her eyes, trying to understand where she was, who she was.

“Whose room is this? What world is this? Is this a dream, or was that a dream, that village, that tree, the Lucid City?” Dawn tried pulling the faint threads of images still simmering in her mind into the shimmering clarity and exhilaration she could still feel the echo of, but could not remember the details of the world she had just come from.

Her eyes blink in the room around her. It seems to construct itself around her. “If only I could breathe, wholly, fully, the way I felt from where I came from!”

But as her eyes blinked in the objects around her, each held a feeling, a memory, a story. Like a reverse umbilical, the threads of story kept weaving itself around her, compounding into memories binding to each other the way molecules bind into acid chains.

Dawn begins to remember this room is her room, this her, her feelings, her sadness, her longing, her feeling of the air squeezed out of her chest. Her desire to dance, her parents, her love, her job, a whole remembered life rushes into and collapses against the delicate walls of the beautiful dream she struggles to maintain. Before this great compression of all these ideas about who she is and what world she lives in and how hard things could be, Dawn had felt that great feeling of spaciousness within herself that felt like anything was possible.

Dawn tries to hold the dream tight. Wants her totem, kindred, Lucid City, great tree; all of it to stay real. But she can see the day and all of her challenges and responsibilities threatening to break the freedom from the unspoken night.

Her throat unhooks the barbs of their unsaying from her heart.

“OK,” Dawn says, “I promise, I will speak them, I will speak my dream, I release the unspoken from my heart. A world I cannot trust my voice to, a world I cannot speak my heart into, a world that cannot receive the joy and simplicity of my life, is no world for my heart to be.”

Dawn was determined. Yes. She remembered this world, this her that she had just woken back into, with all her own habits and reactions, and this world’s challenges and distractions, but she could still feel the feeling of that other world in her body. Could still feel its crystal sharp clarity.

“That was me, I was Luci in the Lucid City! I was fire and flight and totems. Beloved kindred spirits danced and sang with me.”

Dawn felt that fire breathing in her chest, and she looked through the world she had woken into.

“I am me, this is me, unapologetic, no shame, no apology, I am me. This is what I require. This is what I demand. For I am free, no one else’s freedom can be granted to me.” She declared out loud to herself, to the world, the dream quickly unthreading from her awareness.

Dawn knew now her newest quest. Not to run and hide in dream, but to bring the dream to life. But she couldn’t do it alone. This wasn’t her quest alone. She knew from her dream that she was, that her friends were, that her mother and father and even her boss were Luci too, were waking up from the dream, and they needed to make it as real, more real than the world she had just woken up into, that day by day seemed to be more of a nightmare.

“We have to bring the Lucid City to life! I have to make that world, the world I long for, more real than this world I was born into. I need to learn how to do this. I need my friends to do this with me. We are all in this together.”

Dawn packed her bag. She gathered her magic, her gifts. She sent a message to her friends to join her. She invited that one person she knew needed to come, but she was afraid they wouldn’t understand.

“It’s all of us or nothing. I’ve got to take the risk.”

Dawn went back to the oaks and the tribe where she dreamed her dream to train into something new. This was greater than waking up INSIDE of the dream, they were training for the great turning, they were training to raise the dawn of the dream into the waking world. They would train to bring the dreams they had wished and wondered and learned about into this, their everyday life, the distracted, majority world.

It wouldn’t be easy. Dawn knew it. The biggest challenge is often our own self standing in our way.. She knew in the burning of her heart she had to learn one thing first, the most important thing to build a new world on, she had to learn to trust in her self. She had to learn to trust in her vision. She had to learn to trust in her voice. She had to learn to trust in that she could learn, could grow, could become more than she ever knew she was.

Dawn walked back into the world with all of her training. She burned and danced and smiled and watched and witnessed as her heart burned at the edges around her. She burned with her gentle truth and her fierce truth, her truth that questioned everything, even her own judgments, even her own reactions, even her own beliefs. She let her inquiry burn at the world around her. She discovered two worlds. There was a world that reacted, that shut down, that burned away from the fire of her inquiry. And there was the world of faces, of beings, of kindred spirits that stayed, that glowed brighter with her burning, rather than burning away. Dawn set out her beacon, she called these kindred spirits, these cosmic questers, to join her in their next step: Training.