When I was in my twenties, I used to have a reoccurring dream, or more like, a haunting nightmare. In the dream, I would be sitting on a sunny beach, with the ocean calm and blue as an iced-over lake and the skies gloriously open and endless. All of a sudden, a wave would crest far out on the horizon, then it it would start to grow by leaps and bounds as it neared the shoreline. Obviously, danger was coming, rushing fast toward us on the beach. Some people around me would scramble and run. But I found myself immobilized, fascinated, because the wave, as it grew, was immensely beautiful. Its beauty came from a clarity of sort I can't quite explain. By the time the wave grew enormous and was nearly upon the beach, panic would hit me, and I would start to run, knowing it was too late to survive its onslaught. At this point, I would wake up.
I haven’t had this dream in a long time. Last night, I dreamt I was at a resort somewhere in a mildly mountainous region. The resort was a little rustic, but even so, it was slightly run down, with the cabins shabby and the staff a little gruff. I didn’t mind, because the meadows were spectacular. In the dream, from what I remember, I found myself walking across one of these meadows, seemingly alone. Along the path, I came across a very large blue feather. I reached for it, but before I could pick it up, a crow dove to snatch it in its beak, at which point the feather broke in half. I lamented the fact that this feather was the only evidence of the existence of a giant blue heron that was difficult to spot, and which we thought was extinct.
As I moved on, I heard some people shouting at me to stop moving. I then heard the growls, unmistakable, of a lion and a bear. But when I looked back, at the other edge of the meadow, the lion and the bear seemed oddly small, like toy animals, and not at all interested in me.
The next part of the dream that I recall had me sunning myself on the resort’s “beach,” which was a wide swath of dirt path between two berms, looking much like a river bed, without the water. As I sat chatting with people, a sudden gush of muddy water swept through the “beach,” taking with it my stuff, including my purse with my wallet and cell phone. Turns out that a staff member goofed by turning the wrong dial that released water in our direction. I was stunned and furious. There was no way to lodge a complaint, because the staff suddenly disappeared. And there I was, without a cell phone, unable to recall any of the phone numbers, even those of my loved ones, to come help me. And then, there was the issue of replacing all the documents that the sudden gush of this muddy rivulet took: the credit cards and the driver’s license.
It’s odd, I thought to myself this morning, as I sipped my first cup of tea, how I went from dreams of the ocean rising in a terrifying splendor, a beauty that was going annihilate me, to one in which a tiny human error unleashes a trickle, but which also promises to annihilate. The title wave of my old dreams was no threat to my identity, even as it came to grind my body down. The trickle of muddy water, on the other hand, left my body intact, but took my identity, the public one, at any rate, in its small eddies, and swallowed it in a hiccup.
So now, even in my dreams the world has shrunk. If I were of the gloomy sort, prone to reading visions in dreams, I would have to say that this devolution means that the way I see it, or rather my unconscious sees it, the world is not going to end in with a bang. Nope, it will go out in a whimper, as our wallets and cell phones go down the drain.
