Have you ever had a dream that was so compelling that you lay in bed half awake reliving it for several nights after it occurred? It is 4:52 am on May 10th and I am not sure if this dream happened the night before last, the 9th, or the night before that. I do know that my dreams have been incredibly vivid for the past three or four days when usually I can’t remember them – or if I do they are very mundane. I have been working for several hours every day in my garden this week under beautiful, clear sunny skies; getting much more vitamin D than I usually accrue in a year I imagine. I have been moving compost and bending my body weeding and I have been sleeping with the bright spotlight of the super moon shining on me through my bedroom window at night. Whatever the cause, I have truly appreciated the three consecutive nights of amazing vivid dreaming.
So….tonight my dreams were back to being unexceptional but I found myself half awake and reliving once again my amazing dream from the night before and was compelled to get out of my warm bed and write it down.
My husband and I arrive in a room to take a test so that we can get a job, possibly as a CNA. We are waiting in the classroom and are joined by two other people, one that I recognize as being an old friend from college that I have not seen in years. The proctor for the test comes in the room and hands out tests and pencils and everyone has started the test when I realize that I was not given one. The proctor says that because I did not start with everyone else that I cannot take the test.
I am very upset and leave the building and go out into a silent, snowy night trying to find where I left the car. There is so much snow that it blankets everything and is very compacted on the streets leading me to think it is very deep with high drifts along the sides of the roads. There are dark fir trees along the side of the road giving the feeling of a canyon. There is light from street lights to guide my way but everything looks so different I get turned around and wander through the snowy landscape until I finally find a familiar road. I am dressed in Tall suede boots and a long snow parka with a fur lined hood and I look like a pregnant Eskimo. I have passed armed guards who look at me but do not speak. I walk quickly down a hill to a large open area where my car should be and which is in front of a large building.
I am now in that building and am one of a group of people, possibly a family grouping and we are trying to get out of this building we have mistakenly entered. The building is huge and every door we try is locked and the exits we can see are blocked by armed guards in gray and red uniforms who bar our way. We walk for miles it seems, twisting back when we can no longer go down a hallway. We are not actively chased at this point just not allowed to leave. We can get glimpses of the outside through windows we pass and through glass doors that we cannot go through. Green outside, gray inside. The building has the look of a museum and a the feeling of a state institution or archive. In parts it has the escalators and airiness of a mall without the shops.
The scene changes and it is late Summer or Autumn. Everything is brown. I am wearing a brown dress belted at the waist and brown hat and brown pumps. My hair is brown. The ground is dry and dusty and the buildings around us are old and wooden, worn by time, old farm buildings maybe. An orchard with leafless trees is across the road from where I stand. People from the community come down a dusty unpaved road to find us; one bringing a strange mechanical piece with sharp edges, rotating blades and a handle that looks somewhat like a grater. It is bright silver and gleams. The things they bring to trade are valuable far beyond what food should cost and are parts from much larger machines. They come to trade these things for food but we have none to give them and they leave angry at us.
We are chased now and there are only two of us; my brother and I. We are running through a forest and he jumps up into the branches of a tree and looks down at me. His hair is wild and his pants are ragged. He has no shoes. I run to the tree and into the tree. My hands plunge into the tree up to my forearms as if into water and as I pull them back I see that I have left cavities in the tree in the exact shape of my hands. My brother is not able to do this and is left behind or captured. At every turn I am thwarted but I change and find new abilities at each setback.
I find myself at last in a palace. Once again people watch me from their offices as I travel through the building even though I no longer have a physical body. I am able to change into whatever form I choose and I float for a time as a speck of dust but even in that form heads turn and track my progress down the hallways.
I am being herded toward something and then find myself in a hallway with armed people coming for me from both sides. They are becoming more threatening. I see a large picture window behind me and escape through it, passing through the clear glass as if it was not there and floating out into a blue sky. I start to rise higher in the air, high into the stratosphere, changing my form into that of an airship but jet planes are scrambled and follow me and I know they will never leave me alone.
I have an epiphany. I will go to the center of the Earth where these people cannot follow me.
I change one more time into a being without physical form and I plummet toward the ground. As I descend I become entirely and completely whatever I touch or pass through. Each change is a distinct and separate experience. In a flash I go through twenty stories of an office building, In a strobe effect I change into every particle I touch, becoming the paint, the sheet rock, the wood that came from trees that had lived fifty slow years under blue skies and gray, the people who worked there… I was them, knew their whole lives in a flash and then was through into the calmer region of the ground, the soil and rock much less noisy than the building had been. It is dark here and quiet. The worms, microbes and mice do not threaten me. Quieter still as I go through and become bedrock. I am finally in the center of this world and am amazed that it is not fiery and hot. Instead I reappear as myself in a room hollowed from the ground, everything gently rounded and around a corner I can see strangers seated on benches around a long table. They turn and look dispassionately at me. I sing my song of myself. I sing a beautiful song and the goddess of the planet listens and smiles at my song and gives me a great gift. All the strangers at the table and those who have followed and threatened me are now transformed into my family and friends who were lost along the way on my journey. They stand from the table and welcome me with open arms and wide smiles.
Then I woke up…and lay there thinking about this dream, remembering as much of it as I could and hoping I would not forget it in the morning before drifting back into sleep.
Then again this morning I found myself doing the same thing and I realized that I needed to get up and write it down before I could let it go.
The most amazing part of the dream was the experience of dropping through the building. It was like one of those flashcard movies I would make as a kid, where each sheet of paper had a different stick figure drawn on it advancing a little on each page and when it was done you would flip the pages as fast as you could to get the stick man to tumble run across the page. I flipped through various states of matter and memory like the pages of a flashcard movie, each state experienced entirely and completely in a fraction of a second and then gone. Then the next and the next. That was why the ground seemed so quiet in comparison.
I wish I could hear the song again too. I can’t remember it at all now other than knowing I sang it.
