I saw the face of God and it was Dromarch

Some dreams are terrifying. Some dreams are comforting. Some dreams are flatly mundane until the inside of your head invents some new type of car alarm that punches out a screech to wake you up, for no earthly or unearthly reason.

Some dreams are revelations. Some dreams reveal nothing at all.

Some dreams are a blank canvas built atop an invisible plane coated in cotton balls.

"Hello," said Addam, and felt the diagonal sound of it. It was like a "hello" you bounced off the side of a racquetball court, a "hello" that tilted your chin and squinted your eyes, a "hello" that went up and then quite possibly went many more places after that.

It was a curious hello, but very polite, which was what Addam felt was, in general, appropriate for such an occasion. The creature had an all-encompassing air of importance- or, no, rather, it had an air of significance. Of weight. Of fulfillment.

Of sonority. Tremendously so, that. Addam heard a "Hello..." back, but dismissed it as a deepening echo of his own, in the billowy clouding space.

Strange, that he accepted so quickly that he did hear it. The sound, he knew, had existed, had waved and woven its way through the air. It wasn't that he thought he had heard it. He did hear it. Certainly. The laws of physics had bent themselves, obeyed and obliged, to create sound. Sound! Sound and fury. But for all of its fervor, it couldn't possibly have come from this creature.

And then, the most terrifying thing of all: the great white beast smiled at him.

The face, round and sculpted to the point of quasi-cumulous, was not malicious in affect neither effect.

"Can I help you?" asked the tiger, and its voice was the sound of a hearthstone lit at the base of a waterfall.

Addam, despite all sense and fear, reached out a hand to touch the alabaster fur, and when he did so every stripe melted away into the clouds.

He awoke in a familiar bed, with navy sheets accented in slate gray and beige. His bed, that was right. To his left side was his wife - Flora, that was her name.

Odd, that. Coming into contact with this strange, but ultimately quite certainly very benign, creature had cast everything into blocks of absolute relief. This object was a bed, within a structure that only after some moments of coarse blinking revealed itself to be a house - no, a manor - that was in fact his - no, their! - home.

It was as if the beast were absorbing (had absorbed! if it was not still working at this very moment...) all the colloquial knowledge out of its host's head and restoring it in a manner composed to acquaint the stranger with the surroundings; a strange sort of learning exercise.

Some omnipotent, omnipresent, omniprescient apparition of mythical appearance and stature, observing the natural world through the sleeping eyes of men?

"Flora?"

"Are you alright, Addam?"

"I'm fine, yes..."

"You're sure you don't have a fever? The sheets feel a little damp."

"I think I've met the Architect."

"In this bed? Well." Flora's side of the bed made a rumpling sound. "I'm sure I'm roundly offended that he didn't come visit me, on his way."

"Oh, yes. Indeed." Addam patted the sheets. Cool, as if the bed were fashioned fully of ether-borne water. Was this the trace of a midnight miracle?

"As you wish."