She woke with that familiar heat still in her chest, the kind that feels like a scene continuing after the lights come on.
Her notebook was already on the nightstand. Her hand went to the page first.
A few words made it down before the dream started sliding away:
love triangle
too intense
I was chosen
someone kept pressing in
She stayed still long enough to let the feeling settle into a shape.
In the dream, there were three of them again.
The beloved. Steady. Close. A presence that felt loyal without needing to announce it.
Her—the one living it from the inside, seeing through her own eyes, feeling every glance like it mattered.
And the third.
Always the third.
The third carried urgency wearing a face. An insistence that arrived with the energy of: Include me.
At first, the roles refused clarity. Some nights the intruder felt like her. Some nights the beloved felt like her. The whole triangle behaved like one system acting through three bodies.
Then the series repeated—night after night—and repetition did what it does: it left footprints.
She laughed about it in daylight, even while it tightened her ribs. The laughter had that particular relief of recognizing a pattern in motion.
One morning, coffee in hand, she spoke softly, as if to someone in the next room:
“Alright. You want in.”
A decision. Clear. Steady.
That night, the dream returned—and the temperature changed.
The triangle still existed, still charged, still alive. Yet the scene held more space. Her chest eased. The third presence hovered close, then settled, as if it had been waiting for permission to stop fighting for oxygen.
A few nights later, the third introduced her to a child.
The introduction happened in an ordinary way—come meet—like this had been true for a long time.
She looked at the child and felt something in her soften into family. The love didn’t split. It widened. The triangle released like a knot untied from the inside.
When she woke, she wrote one clean line beneath the earlier notes:
Ego relaxes with inclusion.
She underlined it once, like a timestamp.
—
A week later—maybe two—she lay down again and asked a different question.
The question carried more readiness than instruction: I’m ready for what comes next.
She fell asleep with that readiness in her mouth like a taste.
The dream answered in a new dialect.
A screen.
Drive(s). Sync. Elapsed time.
Strings of machine-assigned names stretched across the interface—slashes, underscores, letters and numbers that felt like coordinates to a place she hadn’t visited with her waking body.
Her attention moved over the labels the way a finger moves over braille.
Then a detail flared.
A few characters turned red.
Only a segment. A seam.
She leaned in. The red held her. The red made a quiet claim: Here.
In the corner, elapsed time counted forward with calm devotion, like it had been counting long before she arrived to watch.
She didn’t feel commanded. She felt routed—
as if the red segment was a gentle request to stop carrying the whole system alone,
to let the system keep running while the conscious mind shifted into relationship with it.
When she woke, she wrote one clean line beneath the last line:
The conscious mind relaxes with shared governance.
She underlined it once, like a timestamp.
Of course, she thought. Reasonable.
—
Lately, at the point where lucidity usually sparks—right at the lift where she would normally wake inside the dream—the dream changed its mind about waking.
Her eyes almost opened.
Then her body chose sleep.
Decisive. A weight returned to her limbs like a door closing with care.
One time she even felt it perform a small drama—nose stuffy, throat scratchy, the suggestion of a cold—like calling in sick from lucidity.
As if her body had its own language for boundaries:
Leave me alone. I’m sleeping now.
When she finally surfaced for real, sunlight already higher than she wanted, she stared at the ceiling and smiled.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I heard you.”
She opened the notebook and wrote, without debate:
Body relaxes when it feels safe.
—
She sat back and let the sequence arrange itself—romance to interface to body to play—each layer teaching her in its own accent.
Her own definition sat nearby, plain and bright.
“I relax when I’m creating,” she wrote.
The sentence looked respectable on the page, like something she could show someone.
She stared at it, amused.
Then she added the truer line beneath it:
“I relax when I’m having fun.”
Creating, fun—she could feel how her mind wanted one word to be cleaner, more presentable, easier to file.
She let the honest word stay.
On the next line she drew a tiny panel, like a joke only she would understand:
Status: in progress
Exception: red text
Elapsed: counting
Directive: sleep
At the bottom of the page, she wrote the question that had been forming since the triangle cooled and the red text flared:
What does relax mean?
As practice. As a living definition.
As in:
What does relax mean to ego?
What does relax mean to the conscious mind?
What does relax mean to the body?
What does relax mean to the part of her that plays and makes things for the joy of making?
She closed the notebook.
The system kept running.
Her “I” stayed close enough to listen.
Thank you for taking this trip with me. I had fun. I hope you do too.
— Stomari
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Any mention of 'The Beloved' captures my attention, and my heart. Beyond that, this was so interesting. What an interesting way to write about this.