A Dream Within A Dream Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Last night I died
the easy way—
a veil fell
in a temple its builders forgot.

My Earthly Self found me
between two breaths,
where clocks shed their faces
and moments kneel into becoming.

We rose through inward-folding time,
a dream dreaming itself awake—
past the lattice of stars,
past the mirror where light
first witnesses itself.

The universe breathed out its final word,
a mantra folded
back into silence too shy for sound.
Galaxies unwrote their fires,
embers remembered they were forests,
and every wounding syllable
returned to the quiet that spoke it first.

Time traced its path to the source.
Graves opened like eyes in meditation.
The dead rose as one
and bowed to their own forgetting.

"Did you bring cookies? "
my Earthly Self asked,
as eternity settled its spine.

That question held the cosmos—
not the calculus of rising,
nor form's sweet collapse into void,
but the small, absurd hunger
for sweetness at the lip of dissolution.

I searched my empty pockets
as the aeon reset its pulse,
feeling loss's gravity
in the lightest way:

Even at the Absolute's edge,
we are echo and hunger,
hands cupped for warmth,
wondering if we carried
something gentle with us
through the dream
that dreams us.

—February,16,2026