My 5-year-old toes

on the precipice of a cliff

dropping straight down a football

field into the churning river below.  I saw it

at Riverview Park with my own 5-year-old eyes – my

toes on the edge of an abyss, the swirling river below.  I was

there, yearned to return to that place for years, for the déjà vu of it

all, to experience another moment of living on the edge, another adrenaline

rush, until the concrete thinking of childhood began to give way to the capacity for

abstract thought of adolescence.  Make no mistake, I was there, my parents and two older

sisters were my witnesses as they stood in a line perpendicular to me, as I took one

step at a time forward only to look back and see them all frozen at attention, no

one breaking formation, no one saying a word, just watching and waiting for

me to reach the edge.  Just watching and waiting as my toes reached the

precipice.  Damn the capacity for abstract thinking.  Damn the power

of deductive reasoning.  How could I have been somewhere that

doesn’t exist, that never existed? My dear parents and sisters

would never have just stood there, rank and file, like toy

soldiers, motionless and speechless as I stepped right

up to the razor’s edge.  So, could it be that lucid

dreams can open portals to parallel universes,

where dreams are spiked with dopamine

to make our dreamscapes fuel our

imaginations for everything

our landscapes can be

when we believe

in our dreams?