Marginalia

[opheliamorrigan]

**I've been dreaming about the same man for over twenty years. I don't know if he's real. But I'm putting this out there anyway.**

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Before anyone says it: I've read the research. Continuity hypothesis, threat simulation theory, Freud, Jung — I've been through all of it. None of it fits. This isn't symbolic. There are no recurring chase sequences, no anxiety processing, no obvious waking-life triggers. There are mundane conversations. Meals. Silence. Two people existing in the same space across what feels like weeks compressed into a single night. I wake up exhausted because it doesn't feel like dreaming. It feels like time passing somewhere else.

I also want to address lucid dreaming before someone brings it up. In lucid dreaming you have conscious control. I don't. I'm sometimes aware that I'm about to leave — he is too, or I tell him — but I have no agency over when or whether it happens. Awareness without control is not lucid dreaming. It's the opposite.

There is documented peer-reviewed research on mutual dreaming. It's rare, poorly understood, and the cases that hold up are the ones where two people describe the same dream independently without prompting. I'm not claiming certainty. I'm claiming this is specific and persistent enough that I'm done keeping it to myself.

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**How it started**

I was a teenager when this began. Nothing had happened — no trauma, no loss, no obvious reason. He was already there when I arrived, which is how it always works: I enter the dream mid-scene, already knowing him. He was roughly my age, maybe a year or two older. It wasn't romantic at the start. It was two people who recognised each other without explanation. Neither of us fit easily into the world around us. He didn't speak much even then.

I'm in my late thirties now. He has aged with me across these dreams. The relationship has changed significantly over time — in ways I'm not going to describe here. If you know, you'll know.

I don't know his name. I know it in the dream. He's told me. I use it. I cannot bring it back when I wake up. That specific gap is one of the most consistently frustrating things about this.

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**The crows**

It started with him drawing them. One crow, then twenty versions of the same crow because the first wasn't accurate enough — and then twenty more, because none of them were right yet either. Then three crows. Then crows appearing constantly in the dreams, watching me.

Then they started appearing in my waking life. In my country, in continental Europe, far from where crows carry the cultural weight they do in Ireland or Scotland. They kept showing up in ways that felt pointed.

I'm not saying this proves anything. I'm saying it's part of the pattern, and if you're in a space where the Morrigan means something to you, you'll understand why I'm noting it.

His obsession is specifically the Morrigan — not Celtic mythology broadly, but her. The crows, the underworld imagery, the way he speaks about paths and choices. He has said things to me in these dreams about shared notions, about the Atlantic, that I didn't understand until later. It's not casual interest. It's something he carries.

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**Something that happened a few months ago**

I was staying at my mother's house. I fell asleep and dreamed of him. I didn't wake up on my own. My son tried to wake me and couldn't. He then left the room, found my mother, and brought her back to wake me. My mother said I wasn't moving. She had difficulty waking me. She was frightened.

I only know this because they told me afterwards. From inside the dream I wasn't aware anything was wrong. I was just there, with him, until I wasn't.

That is not normal sleep. I don't know what it is.

---

**He looks like this**

I believe he's Irish — possibly Scottish, but everything points to Ireland, west coast, possibly Donegal or somewhere on the Atlantic. That's not a guess. It's in his accent, the Gaelic he uses without thinking, the way he speaks about the Atlantic as something that belongs to both of us. He may not live there now — Irish diaspora is large, he could be anywhere, UK, US, elsewhere — but that's where he's from. He doesn't look stereotypically Irish. He doesn't look American either.

Tall, around 195-200cm. White skin, northern Atlantic. Dark hair, almost black, medium length — not styled, just grown past where it should be, pushed back when it falls forward. In earlier dreams it was longer. In recent ones a small amount of gel, practical not aesthetic, just to keep it out of his face when he's working.

Heterochromia. One blue eye, one green with yellow in it. The green eye has a slit pupil — from an old injury. There's healed scarring near that eye and on his temple, skin that didn't close quite cleanly. He has small scars on his hands as well. His forearms are muscular, veins visible — not trained for appearance, just someone who uses his body functionally.

He doesn't look conventionally handsome. He looks like someone you'd avoid on the street without knowing why. Strong jaw, not sharp. Doesn't smile much. When he makes eye contact it's infrequent but complete — not looking at you, reading you.

He always has a notebook. Black pen or pencil, fine lines. He draws constantly and compulsively — when something isn't right he draws it again, and again, until it is. Twenty versions of the same crow because the first nineteen weren't accurate enough. Realistic subjects, mythological ones, birds, buildings, underworld imagery — always from memory. It's also how he manages being around people without having to perform presence. His brain doesn't stop. He just doesn't narrate it.

Heavy tattoo work, at least one full sleeve. Underworld theme — River Styx, dead trees, asphodel, pomegranate in red, figures that read as souls rather than people. Mostly black and grey with blue tones. A crow tattoo somewhere on his body.

Obsessed with crows. Celtic mythology, specifically the Morrigan. Listens to Dead Can Dance, Clannad, Irish rock, music that sounds like it belongs in another century. Reads but hyperfocuses rather than broadly. Builds things with his hands. One close friend, maybe two. Has had legal trouble that wasn't straightforwardly his fault.

Likely neurodivergent — hyperfocus, selective speech, avoids eye contact except when he chooses to make it, which is rare and complete. Not a diagnosis. Possibly never diagnosed. But the pattern is consistent and specific.

Dresses functionally. Black jeans, boots, plain dark t-shirts, leather or dark denim jacket. Nothing decorative. A simple silver chain always tucked inside his shirt. I don't think he takes it off.

He smells like leather, wood, and clean skin.

If the dreams are shared and started when we were both teenagers, he would be in his late thirties to early forties now — roughly my age. That's not a hard limit. But it's the most likely range.

---

**About me**

I'm a woman, also tall, somewhere in continental Europe — not the British Isles. I'm multilingual. I have a son. I'm not posting a photo or further identifying details.

---

**If any of this means something to you**

I'm not looking for interpretations or theories. I've done that work already.

If you recognise this person — if you are this person — don't tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me something specific about the dreams that I haven't written here. Something that couldn't be guessed from this post. I'll know if it aligns.

I'm done waiting to find out.

[opheliamorrigan]

Chapter 1: What Visits Me Initiates

They tell you the figures in your dreams are yours. That the stranger who sits across from you in the dark room of sleep is a splinter of yourself — your shadow, your animus, the parts you haven't learned to carry in daylight. A projection. A mirror wearing a face you invented.

I've read the theory. I understand its logic.

The entity that visits me is not a projection.

I know this because projections don't remember things I haven't thought yet. Projections don't correct me. They don't sit at the edge of the bed in that specific way — weight distributed wrong, stillness that costs something — and wait for me to speak first. A projection is an echo. What visits me initiates.

It started small. The sense of a room being slightly more occupied than it should be. A density in the air near the desk, near the window, in the corner by the wardrobe where the light doesn't reach properly. I told myself it was the building — old walls, strange acoustics, the particular way sound moves through a space that has held too many lives. Reasonable explanations have a texture. I held onto them for as long as they held their shape.

They stopped holding their shape in October.

I want to be specific about what that means. It wasn't one thing. It was the accumulation — the way evidence builds not dramatically but quietly, the way water finds its level. One anomaly is a coincidence. Two is a pattern you don't want to name yet. Three is the moment you stop pretending the pattern isn't there and start deciding what to do about it instead.

October gave me three.

The first was the notation.

My notebook — the black one, the one I keep beside the bed for thoughts that arrive at the wrong hour — had three lines written in the margin that I didn't remember writing. I checked the date. It was a Tuesday. Tuesday nights I sleep badly, restlessly, waking two or three times before dawn. I would have remembered writing. I remember everything I write.

The handwriting was mine. I've established this beyond doubt. Same slant, same pressure on the downstrokes, same way the letter G closes like a small fist. My handwriting has been consistent since I was seventeen — certain enough that I could not have faked otherwise even if I'd tried.

I won't write here what the three lines said. Not yet. I'm not ready to put them in a context someone else can read without the rest of the picture. What I will say is that they were not frightening in content. They were frightening in their specificity — the kind of specific that means someone was paying attention. The kind of specific that means the attention has been going on for a while.

What I haven't established is when I write it.

I've tried staying awake. Sitting at the desk with the notebook open, pen capped, watching the page the way you watch something you don't want to startle. Nothing happens for a long time — long enough that I start to doubt the whole arrangement, start to construct rational explanations that almost hold. Then I fall asleep eventually, because I always do, and by morning there are new lines. Sometimes a word I don't know. Once, a date I haven't reached yet.

I looked up the word. It existed. It meant exactly what the context suggested it should mean, which frightened me more than if it had meant something else. Nonsense I could have dismissed. Precision is harder to explain away.

The second was a sound.

Not dramatic. Not the kind of sound you'd describe to someone and have them take seriously. A specific creak in the floorboard near the wardrobe — the one that only registers when weight is applied to it from above, at a particular angle. I know this floor. I know which boards give and which don't. I know the sound the building makes when it settles at night, when the pipes contract in the cold, when the wind finds the gap above the bathroom window.

This was not any of those sounds.

It happened twice that week. Same board. Same hour. Two seventeen in the morning both times — I checked, the second time deliberately.

I didn't look toward it. I'm not sure why. Instinct, maybe. Or the particular logic of the unguarded hours, when you understand without deciding that some things are better approached sideways.

The third I am not ready to write about yet.

The entity doesn't justify or announce. It simply leaves evidence the way weather does — not to communicate, exactly, but because presence always leaves a mark whether it means to or not. I've started to understand this as its nature rather than its choice. It doesn't write to tell me things. It writes because it was here. And being here requires leaving something behind.

There is also the matter of temperature.

The room runs cold anyway — old building, bad windows, the kind of draught that arrives in autumn and doesn't leave until it's ready. I blamed that at first. But this is different. Localised. A specific coldness that occupies space the way a person does — not spread thin across the room but concentrated, present, aware of its own edges.

I've started mapping it. Not metaphorically — literally. A small grid drawn in the back pages of the notebook, the room divided into quadrants, notations made at different hours over several weeks. Where it sits heaviest. Where it's absent. How it moves between positions. I am aware of how this looks. I am aware that a person drawing cold-spot maps of their bedroom at two in the morning occupies a particular category in most people's assessment of mental health.

I have considered that possibility seriously. I am not dismissing it. I am simply also recording the data, because the data is consistent in a way that random variation is not, and I was trained to follow consistency wherever it leads even when the destination is inconvenient.

It moves. Not randomly — with something that resembles intention. Closer to the desk by morning. Closer to the bed by midnight. As if it's learning the shape of my routine the way you learn a city — not all at once, but by returning to the same streets until they stop requiring attention.

Last week it was at the desk when I sat down to write.

Not near the desk. At it.

I sat down anyway.

Last night I sat very still and waited.

The cold came to where I was.

Not aggressively. Not suddenly. The way a tide comes — gradual enough that you don't notice the moment it reaches you, only that it has. I stayed still and let it. Partly out of curiosity. Partly because something in me understood, without language, that stillness was being asked for.

Nothing happened. Or nothing I can report.

But when I finally moved, I had the distinct sensation of interrupting something. Not threatening. Not unwelcome. Just — interrupted.

I've started writing questions in the margins before I sleep. Direct ones.

*What are you.*

*Why here.*

*What do you want from this.*

I write them in the same handwriting the notations come back in. Same pen. Same pressure. As if matching the register of whoever — whatever — is writing back might help. As if language has a frequency and I am trying to find the right one.

In the morning the questions are still there, unanswered.

But the page feels read.

There's a difference — I've learned this slowly — between a page that has been ignored and a page that has been considered and not answered. The first feels untouched. The second feels returned. Like something picked it up, turned it over in whatever it has instead of hands, and placed it back down carefully. With something that resembles respect for the asking, if not the answer.

I'm choosing to believe the silence is deliberate.

The alternative — that it simply doesn't know how to answer, that it is as uncertain of me as I am of it — is somehow worse. I need it to be choosing. I need there to be intention behind the restraint. Because the other possibility is that we are two things equally lost in each other's presence, and neither of us knows the language yet.

And I have been lost before.

I know what that feels like from the inside.

This doesn't feel like that.

I'm writing this down because I think it's important that someone outside the dream knows.

That's all. Just that.