Sometimes I think the dreams are most vivid when            
  the eyes are open; when the stuff of fantasy is not       
    seen through the shifting shadow of sleephaze, but      
      through the clear lens of experience.  It comes       
    often, and unexpected, in the form of luxuriant         
  dark tresses and pearl-black eyes, clad in the            
light patterns of a gingham fabric dress. It also           
  comes in drab olive, splotched with grey and brown        
    and carrying a thing of cold steel which erupts         
      with piercing, cataclysmic fire.  It comes in         
    a wave of surging arms, flowing monsterlike             
  over the city streets, pushing and beating and            
killing, or in lines of gold that fall like gentle          
  rain from the midnight sky. We run all our lives          
    through dreams, scarce knowing the waking from          
  the dreaming, knowing the touch, the heat, the            
feel and the fear, and then, suddenly, gone                 
  and fading like the moon in the dawning sky.