Who doesn't know what Morpheus looks like? Ha! This face is familiar to everybody - everybody sees it, just close your eyes with the cover of dreams. Everyone knows the dreamer, everyone has heard his name. Morpheus comes to every sleeper, every person or god. Everyone who sleeps... while Morpheus sleeps.
Irida is a young messenger, a light-legged girl. She is interested in how to deliver news to Morpheus, who is always asleep.
So far, no one has given her such instructions, but she does not sit still for a minute, and when she has free time, she entertains herself with her own tasks and riddles. She enthusiastically searches for Morpheus' bed to sing him a morning song, make him go out of his sleep and enjoy real life. But he never finds it - it is stopped by Hermes: the same light-legged, fast messenger, but not a young man anymore - in his eyes the cunning of an experienced prodigy competes with the wisdom of an experienced traveler.
- Don't even try," Hermes says without any foreword.
- But I... how do you know? - Irida is surprised with naivety, which is peculiar only to children and young rainbows. Hermes smiles:
- I tried it too.
- But I didn't do it, did I? - The older colleague is encouraged by the girl.
- No. It's dangerous," warns the messenger. Now Irida laughs:
- With what? What can Morpheus do? He's just a young man, he's giving us magical dreams, it's wonderful!
Now Hermes laughs, but not cheerfully - he mocks the naivety of the young goddess.
- Young man, you say? And what do you think Morpheus looks like?
- Everybody knows that," says Irida confidently. - He is a beautiful black-haired young man, thin and slender, calm and smiling...
Hermes is snorting:
- Yeah, I would have found a bed. No, it's not that. You, young lady, have one thing on your mind, serve you young and beautiful...
Irida's flashing:
- As if you know better!
- Morpheus is a bearded old man," Hermes answers quietly. - You can find him on a poppy field, poppies sprouted even through his body, poppies resting in his hands and drops of sleepy potion on his skin, preventing him from waking up.
Irida thinks, opens her mouth to ask where the poppy field is, but Hermes gently interrupts her thoughts, not even having time to turn into a sound.
- Don't wake up Morpheus. Morpheus is good, only while he is sleeping. Morpheus is a dream, waking him up, you will kill him and all life.
Irida reluctantly retreats.
But her curiosity got even stronger: she is sure she knows how Morpheus looks, she has seen his dark curls more than once, but she saw the same confidence in the eyes of Hermes, when he told about the mysterious eternal sleeping elder... She thinks: who knows what Morpheus looks like?
...Everyone knows what Morpheus is like. Everyone has seen his face. Only few have shared this intimate knowledge - and very few have kept it to themselves when they woke up - so no one knows if the face that the dream smiled upon him is true.
Morpheus scatters the sand in his crib. The sand makes his eyes cry and close themselves, but the sand is magical: it immediately dissolves and penetrates into his mind. Sand castles are scattered in sand dragons, they are covered with flowers from colored grains of sand that disappear with morning sunlight. Disobedient children who are capricious and do not want to sleep, the sand blinds their eyes, makes them cry until you pay them in full. It is said that then Morpheus takes the children's eyes as a payment for disobedience and takes them to the moon with his offspring. However, these are only fairy tales that babysitters intimidate the kids - Morpheus does not need anything material.
Suddenly Morpheus - also a sandy creature, fragile - will fall apart, but touch it?
Morpheus opens umbrellas over children's beds. How lucky: you will get a colored umbrella, a fairy tale, and the dream will be easy and exciting, then dark, with heavy nightmares. Sometimes Morpheus is cunning and slips in beautiful colorful umbrellas to the children he likes more often than it should be. They say that he gives fairytale visions only to obedient children, and nightmares go to pranks. But Morpheus is not a tutor or moralizer, he often submits to the occasion, reveals the picture, which will be pulled from under a wide cloak without thinking about its addressee.
Maybe Morpheus is a master craftsman and keeper of thousands of ghostly umbrellas, maybe his hands are calloused and his eyes are chained like those of a watchmaker or an artist?
No one can find Morpheus' box, so no one has seen it. Morpheus is asleep, his rest is unbreakable. He is saved by the ocean water column, which has reliably sheltered his body from the noise of waking up. Morpheus stretched out his wings, his tentacles moving smoothly on his face in time with the superficial stormy storms that will not disturb him.
Morpheus is asleep, don't wake him up.