3 A.M. Series—Wrangle Of Deliriums

Beyond realm, beyond tether, beyond dream...

I woke at 3:33 as a dying star exploded in my dream — my escape is ejecta’s child beyond this realm.
Do you yearn for what’s beyond this realm? My mind chases that spark daily, a restless hum like a Caddo River riffle. My Tardis is Writing, it’s my therapy, catching the wild dreams that bloom from my waking thoughts — flashes of starlight and untamed skies. It’s my outlet for spilling the ache of my tethered soul onto these pages. Yet it’s also an inlet, a sliver of a crack where the universe murmurs its truths. I scribble to untangle my existence, to hear what calls from beyond the stars. I’m Ejecta’s Child, woven from cosmic threads, longing for more.


It’s 3:33 A.M., and I woke, being flung from a dying star that exploded as I was skimming its surface. My heart thrashed, like a trout caught in a Caddo River net, and I sat bolt upright, my sheets were tangled like briars around my legs. My legs and feet were on fire, wrapped in barbed wire, aching as if they’d trudged every hollow in Arkansas, and I swung them over the bed’s edge. I stood up, expecting the familiar softness of carpet, but the floor gave way—untuned molecules of silt, soft, like mud dissolving under a spring flood. I slipped, not down but through the floor into a space where air had the taste of iron and starlight from the explosion.

The room was gone. There were no walls, no window framing the view of my Ouachita’s shadowed pines. There was just a hum, low and unsteady, like a banjo string that had been plucked wrongly. My hands clawed at nothing, my fingers brushing motes that flickered with the light of the dead star. It was not dust but sparks of the ejecta, and each tiny piece was pulsing with a frequency that didn’t match my bones. I wasn’t falling anymore, I was just floating, untethered, in a place where gravity forgot how to do its job. The scent of petrichor and pine lingered in my sinuses, a memory of camping beside the Caddo river as a kid, when my grandpa swore the river whispered secrets if you listened just right. He was right, but it doesn’t whisper for everyone, it only reveals secrets to those people who exist outside the box—people like me.

What is this place? A dream stitched from pain, grief and longing, maybe, for the life I’d meant to live before the world shifted? Or maybe it’s something bigger—a crack in the veil of reality, showing me the universe’s loose threads? My chest tightened, not with fear but with a strange ache, an anxiety that was like missing someone I didn’t even know. Then the sparks swirled, forming shapes: a naked beauty standing by a river’s bend, her body formed from the star’s collapse, totally smooth white tanned skin with hair like corn silk, blond and blowing in a gentle wind. I saw my own self, younger, laughing and holding her hand as she melted into my body like a sensual lover, gentle and true. That got me thinking—maybe I wasn’t falling at all; I was arriving, spit out by a collapsed star to see what I’d ignored my entire life.

The hum in the air grew louder, now syncing with my pulse, and the solid ground formed beneath me. It was cool like river stone worn smooth by eons of friction. I stood, my knees were unsteady. I was standing in a clearing that could’ve been any Ouachita hollow, except the sky shimmered with chaotic threads wiggling like worms, it was like a quilt of light and shadow mixed yet not wanting to bond together. I heard a faint breeze, and it carried a river’s murmur but gave up no answers now. Am I still me, or am I now something remade, now vibrating wrong for existence in this world? I’m unsure if I even wish to stay in that original world. I took a step, felt the pine needles crunching under my bare feet, and felt the weight of a question I couldn’t quite name, and it was sharp, like eagles talons in my chest.

The clearing I stood in held its breath. I faced the sky, watching its wormlike threads pulsing, wiggling wildly, each one a vein of the star that had birthed me. I am Ejecta’s Child—what did that mean? I raised my hands, and the sparks followed my motion, orbiting my fingers like fireflies. They whispered, not in words but in vibrations, a language older than the Caddo’s flow. I was no longer just flesh, no longer just the kid who fished the river. I was now woven from the collapse, and my veins were threaded with light that didn’t belong here. Yet this different earth still held me, its damp petrichor scent was intoxicating and still grounding my bones with its gravity. I knelt and pressed my palms into the soil. I felt it hum and push back, vibrating steady, like my heartbeat. I questioned this different earth: Am I a stranger here, or is this my home? The sky didn’t answer me, but the river’s soft murmur grew louder, calling me to walk, to learn about what I now carried. So I rose, the eagle’s talon in my chest gone, replaced by a quiet fire that’s burning to know what’s beyond this existence.

Written by Noisy Wren, ‘25