Two Dreams of Travel…
Dreams have always provided me with inspiration and foresight into my writing and personal life. Sometimes they are based on my day, sometimes they seem like miraculous stories that only my sleeping imagination can conjure up…
I had two dreams last night of fantastical whimsy and terrifying doom.
The first began in a monastery off the Mediterranean coast. A brilliant sea of cotton-candy blue sparkled through the unbarred windows, as rough hands held my arms and dragged me down a corridor of ancient stone and growing moss. I screamed, struggling to go back, and they hauled me after their Master down hall after hall— the glimpses of the sea were the only sight allowing me to foresee the landscape of my future prison. Rats started scrambling down the hall floors. In groups of three. I clung to the walls, as best I could, and the Master paused around a corner, to let me know I would become used to the rodents, before he continued to lead his followers down each twisting hall. He ignored my desperate pleas and frantic begging. I felt skittering claws, gripping my leg. A rat had scurried up my leg, curious about the human invading its path. I shrieked. I struck out, but they had found me now. I felt a strange movement in my right arm’s sleeve. I tried to struggle, to force it out, and a rat started crawling out of my robe… I jerked up in my bed in my bedroom, with my cat and my sister’s dog— still half-asleep— and saw a spider crawl out of my right arm’s sleeve, down my bed, and up my wall to the ceiling…
My second dream that very same night was markably different from the first. I was not the protagonist, but an observer. I watched a man in a circumferencing bay near the hour of sunset, where the water was only thigh-deep for miles. Petals drifted along the surface of the water. So did peaches. Ripe, crimson-and-orange peaches of the softest fuzz that simply drifted across the surface. The man was collecting these peaches. One by one, he washed them vigorously, religiously, in the water before planting them in a wicker basket which he kept floating beside him on the water’s surface. A woman watched him on the opposite shore. He seemed unaware of her as he picked up the next peach, then the next, adding them one by one to his basket. It was a harvest, but a travesty too…