Your dream journal is full of shit like “Fanged squirrel???” and “it’s broken you broke it” and “fucking squids” and “their hand felt like—” and illegible scribbles that might be another language’s script but were probably half-awake fingers fumbling your pen across the page.
You research it anyway. Alphabets, abugidas, abjads; idiographs and pictographs and logographs; syllabaries of a dozen lineages and more. There are more languages than you could ever learn, more scripts than you could ever parse, and none of them look like the symbols you scrawl in your sleep.
You can’t read it. It’s meant for naming the sword you lost, the rattle of rainbow-scaled birds, the old castle down the way—
You never notice the script when you’re in that other place. It’s normal, just like everything else, and only when you’re awake do you realise you’ve forgotten yet another thing that once came as easily as riding a bike didn’t.
You put it in your comic, and tell people “It came to me in a dream” when they ask how you invented the glyphs (scrambled scraps of meaning turned meaningless in your hands).
They laugh.
You smile, brittle.
One day, someone will understand your words.