Nearly every dream I've dreamt in the past forty days has featured water.
I am still in the process of writing out this dream sequence and will add in Water Dream III over the course of the next few days.
Water Dream I: The Brackish Lake and the Tongue-Protruders
In late December of 2010, I dreamt I was trying to rehouse myself in a Madison co-op and that I'd decided to membership my dad along with me. He came all the way from Michigan to have a look. He and I stood on one side of a brackish summer-hot lake, a weedier, fishier version of Lake Mendota in the summer than even that lake often is. We gazed off a dock and looked to an opposite shore where a co-op house stood. I decided to try swimming in the water, not so much decided as felt lured and lulled in by the currents. The brackish lake began to move and lurch, ebb and flow, swell up toward me, then recede with a cloud of weed-hair and slimy fish copying the currents. I dove in and felt my body channeled forward, then ripple back as a mop-head of lake life surged between my outstretched hairs, fingers and feet. I felt the long bodies of fish slip between my hands and fingers, then shot to the surface with a long catch in my left hand. I brandished the fish like a king, riding with it to shore, the opposite shore, waving it at my incomprehending fellows before arcing it back into the air to fall adown back in the lake. Dad resurfaced too right at the co-op, perhaps having driven around in his car. We both membershipped there, enjoying the sights along the pier, trying to make conversation and find suitable food, before we were informed we ought to stay after supper for the 'Buddhist Meditation Workshop'. What ruined the experience for me (I dared not look at Dad) was how the residents kept sitting in fixed yoga positions while sticking out their tongues. In fact, some of them looked like statues, immovable, until you walked by a yoga human - then out came the tongue at you. It was as if one could not ought not take their world seriously, nor would they, and we left.
Water Dream II : The Land of the Whole, the Barn of Netherlandic Bulls, the Anglo-Saxon-Frisian Swim Retinue, the Celtic Queen and the River of Copper Clay, and the Swedish Bards
This compound dream I dreamt on the 13th of January in 2011.
The Land of the Whole
I left my Wisconsin home on a permanent holiday in a land to the East and the Dawn, and I decided to walk the distance. My father's whole clan was there, and we met in the early 19th century house of my father's parents, once located in central Ohio. But as I walked, I was no longer in Ohio, but in Michigan; not in Michigan, but in Britain; not in Britain, but in Ireland; not in any one of them, but in all of them at once. Boundaries. Boundaries overstepped, passed over, gone and intermerged. It wasn't earth, it wasn't heaven, it was earth-heaven, boundless. Rivers flowed to outer oceans leading to outer lands to outseas to outlands, to waterpaths to further lands, and nought wheeled back to the beginning, but each took up their old theme, discarding nothing of the past, embracing all that was to come. There was no cliché, all was rooted but unconventional, and not near post-Modern or surreal (unfitting word for reality) in the least. Paradise had reclaimed the stretches of that ground - and I was there. Suddenly, I was walking down a reborn version of Patterson, Norris and Bowens Mills (?) roads, but the colours seemed more essential and primary, like a painting, but real not representational, like walking inside the animated (literally 'enlivened') film of Watership Down, or C. S. Lewis' vision of Herefordshire in the painting which hung in his childhood nursery (see Brian Sibley's Shadowlands: The True Story of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman.) Light shone in one even gold, not sourced in one horizon or sun, but was one whole-world radiance, soft and golden. Each tree, stone, house or fence was more substantive, less permeable, less divisible, less mutable. The wind couldn't grab the leaves when it brushed through, nor did it barely tickle my ears, but sang songs as it blew instead. My footfalls were not self-protective, nor was anything self-preoccupied, for each thing seemed wise enough to know how to shun self-destruction. Pain and discomfort, those life-preserving cues, weren't needed. No hurt was given or exchanged, and the heart of earth's folly - 'doing only what one wants and never getting what one wants' had no place. One wouldn't think to breathe or hold one's breath except out of awe - nothing was out of need. I was holding my breath, I think, and would not have remembered for how long. The sequences of life weren't anticipation for nourishment or comfort, or fear of pain, but rather an ongoing sense of being lost in wonder at the present moment, a wonder that grew with each step, tracing pathways whose paces never recircled or recycled. Newness knew no end or boundary, and soon I was weeping, as if tears fueled my muscles and energy and motivation like a precious oil. All existed for existence's sake. I was sundered from nothing, soul and body were of one matter, and all of my distinct identity and person remained intact, as did that of every tree and stone.
I've given you a description of it, not of the movement and flow of the experience itself - and that was the experience I had when I dreamt it, one I do not know how to write down. I've made a beginning, a description, do not know how further to convince you of the reality of that vision, for no one who has not walked that land, or seen at least its far-off dim boundaries, the vast rumour of things that cannot be but last, will be convinced it is a real life-on-earth rather than a state of mind. Inside the mind, the cut-off mind, distrustful of the unchartable real, the possessor (victim) is trapped. There where I lived for a time while asleep, you cannot be trapped. You can never more be trapped, jailed inside a single thought derived from an infinite regression of cause-effect mindless processes, because that world never was. Regressive infinity is the Modern's never-never-land, an infinite personless material past that never reaches the present nor deigns to brave the future. That jailed world never was. Never was it anywhere, except in confinement and delusional despair, the only surreal thing one may sip. The experience I had matches in mood and reference point the latter chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Reepicheep sees the Beginning of the End of the World, walks the Wonders of the Last Sea, passes to the Very End of the World, the least thing of anything that ever was which was like an End of anything at all.
The Barn of Netherlandic Bulls
Dreams are as nuanced, boundaried and multi-leveled as real life: I came out of the Paradise sequence with my own two feet still planted in the immature soil of my waking earth. I walked past the boundaries, liminal though they may be, of that Eden’s land, and came to a countryside of broad green pastures, grown and fat for any cattle, udderswollen with grassbitten milk, secretion created in springseeded excrescences. A barn stood wide and high before me, bloodred and whitestained with a starspangled hexagram. Dutch cattle swelled its haychamber rooved under heavy woodbeams, walled in timber-pillared walls, heaven-reaching, earthbound, woodmade. Trees hewn to house food and life and milk, containing peril of horns and spearsteers. I saw them heave their huge necks, muscles of mating anger, forever anger-lusting, rearing at me from behind the pillars. I passed between the Hexagram Barn and a fence-fold, cattle enfolded on both sides, as I walked over the grass, green with grasscream milk not yet in the udders. And fear pushed out my chest as I breathed for dear life. I paused outside of paradise as a young bull, sharphorned, came headbutting and mate-eager toward his masculate opponent, a Nathan fresh from Eden. He made a deep bow with his horns, shot his power into rippled withers, and heaved the horns toward my crotch as he ran at me, enraged by Dutch blood and Dutch milk. His butting run met my fate-bound unfoundering leap, as I fled my most feared animal the bullhorned hungry one, and swung my body up onto the high fence beam of the fold, escaping his bloodspears, and climbed in desperation along the fence above more bulls below me in the humble corral in which they were penned and waiting. A flock of bulls, ladyless, were horny there, after the most literal fashion, and I shouldershot my weight by force of hip and arm over to a chickenwire shed amidmost the fold. Swine were held within, and I climbed overtop them, looking out over the mud and fence range in which the hooved cattle scratched the ground. Then a sudden change: a retinue of strawheaded ‘Dutch’ farmhands poured into the fold, driving the coward cattle in all directions, and looked up at me. Their leader, a wise wizened Netherlandic farmer, bade me come down and serve him and his farm, join his band of sunworkers and meadswillers. I came down, unafraid of the cattle, as the men had overwhelmed the animals with their own presence. He told me to butt toward the bulls, go at them with my own 'horns', never run away, and they would draw back in their fear before they could incite my own. I got in the queue, last of all, intent to follow them and learn from them, as the head farmer led us out into the fields for the haymaking. Foaming cider, honeycakes, apples, rosemary salad, rabbit pasties and bluejay pies with oat and barleymeal filled our gullets at noon in noonsun as we swinked and sweated hard in sunbliss, napping at high noon, joined to lassies with fingers allknowing the cow-udders and allkeeping the lads in warm company. As I worked on, I saw that my ‘Dutchmen’ of Michigan were Anglo-Frisian-Saxons, the early Germanic takers of east Britannia, that I formed their hindmost retinue and must yet be proved and tested. We drove and fed and milked our cattle along the sedge-rich rivers of lowland England, until we left off cattle driving and started on water sports, unbanking our boats into the slow broad rivers of low Angleland and saw the riverbottoms bleed copperred as we rowed our way over their course to Welshland. This border with fallen Druids mingled the Anglish and Welsh roots, and our riversports leader, a woman, approached her Celto-English comitatus, her Angles, as their leader in the sport of bodily daring.
The Anglo-Saxon-Frisian Swim Retinue, the Celtic Queen and the River of Copper Clay
She had full but short dark hair that came to the round tops of her white shoulders, and her skin glowed applered on her chalk cheeks, her eyes deepset under dark brows. All fell silent and action-eager at her words, as she gestured us to look upon the copper clay banks of a fast river, shallow but rapid. We slid off the claycleaving banks into the waters, and followed her wherever she wished us to go. I’d joined the Anglo-Frisian-Saxon swim team, and there was no turning back, nor would we ever again be Lowlanders, whether Dutch or Danish, of the lost continent to the east under our new Welsh and foreign guide. I quickly made friends of my comitatus, who were forthright in their trust and speech, but loved pictures and riddles to drive a point. They bound their lives under oath with my own, had no fear of death or life, whether plucking apples for drink fit for British queens, fermenting honeycomb drippings for Offa, or lying lifeless pierced beyond healing by hornspeared bulls. Our boatleader told us we would spend the next two days skin-to-water, out of boat, afloat, aswim or under water, would come through or be saved by our mates, would live or die in the attempt. She says it is our choice to save our friends from drowning or cramping, that truest friends will win the day. Two days in water? I think to myself. My skin, anyone’s skin, will fall off, I tell myself, and I sadly climb the river banks, too ashamed to look back, and walk away from my company. “I don’t think I can straight swim for more than an hour” I tell myself. When I was on the margins of their sight, I stopped and stood still, then turned back to face them, filled with wonder and sadness. “No, I will go back”, I tell myself. I walk back to them, catching the Saxon second in command, a snooty man who helps our Welsh lady teach us. I say to him I wish to rejoin my retinue, devote my life to them, come life or death. This Saxon is dressed like a Modern man, stylish and trendy, seems to care nothing for the people or ways he heads up. He jerks his head toward her, signing to me to take up my cause with her. I do so, and she gives a subtle smile, looks away, calls my name, says I’m to stand backmost of the men, ready to leap into water. It is at this moment that one of my comrades whispers to me: “It’s not two days straight submerged in water without relief – it’s two days’ worth of water ordeals, in and out of water!” “Oh!” I think to myself, somewhat relieved. The first ordeal is one of speed and vigour, and we are told to swim against the current from a point downstream to a cliffbordered shoreline upstream. One by one, my men make the swim, swimming as swift as their bodies will push them. Those waiting on the shore time the swimmers by tapping the seconds with their bare feet. When it’s my turn, I go crashing against the current like a seal, get to the shore cheered on by my friends, out of breath, who are yelling and gasping my name saying funny things like “You’re fast! You’re one quick dude!”
The Swedish Bards
At this point, we take a brief break from our water tests to soak in entertainment from our ancestors, a small band of elderly Swedish singers and strummers who make music for us, rather after the fashion of the music and poetry chanted by Hróðgar’s Danes or Swedish guests in his Baltic island hall when the Angles and Northmen exchanged peacewives and peacetales in their conflict over land. They single me out as someone who can communicate with these archaic bards, and send me to their booths and smörgåsbords to express the devotion and heartfelt attention from the Angles, Frisians, Saxons and Jutes. I notice that the Swedish servers are decked in modern dress, serving paté, potato cakes, cognac, creamed herring and rye crackers! Many of them are elderly, saying they’d abandoned their depressing if stylish nursing homes for the chance to utter legend and music for their southern siblings. I try speaking Swedish to them for awhile, and they show me a musical manuscript from which they are about to sing. It is quite old, if anachronistic, with origins in the 16th century. As the nyckelharpa strums, I wake up.
Water Dream III:
The Waterfall that Fell out of Heaven
On the 20th of January, 2011, I dreamt I picked my path toward my sister's Westcoast home, having abandoned my parents' cartrip to the same destination. Mom and Dad came by car, and I felt my way along the stones of the Pacific Northwest Coast, with a view to open ocean and the cliff-falling shore. I saw a tall house in the distance, heavily supported with pillars and vertical beams, fair with a porch facing the open sea. I and my parents weren't just visiting, but moving in with my sister (Rachel), having lost houses or lands in our own homely parts of the country. I found the footjourney very slippery, and soon was crawling on hands and feet, pulling myself up by handgripped stone, slipslidey with green moss. I zigzagged, often had to trek athwart my course along mossy ridges, which fell too steeply to descend until a path could be found. I at long last came to a cave open on two ends, the sealight pouring through from the opposite side, and I chose it as the quickest surest way to my sister's house. I clutched on for dear life in the ascent to the cave, almost slipping onrushing down several times, and felt my hands near bloody on the sharp white stone forming the insides of the cave. I hoisted my body up inside, and climbed further in, which entailed moving upward as well as inward until I reached the light at the further end. There at its seaward opening the orifice opened downwards, with a descent and view to the sea. I saw Rachel's large house below, and clambered safely down. As I approached, I saw the seas shadowy and turbid, morbid and dark, restless under some nameless stirring. As dusk came on, the washing waves went black until dawn, when a strange twilight greylight grew over the ocean. I looked up to the heaven over the sea, and saw a cataract pelt down onto the entire width of the sea, the whole length of my vision from south to north, the falling of rain from some high cloud to high to see, and the downpour fell so hard it was a great Niagara, tinged with clouded fire on the perimeters, as if a red sun rose behind the occluding waterfall. The rush of waters roared through the distance, and I saw the shores seem to rock and sway under the rising waters surging in a giant sea-tub, a bathtub of all the seas of earth, rising, rising. I was on the porch, ran inside to find my family. The corridors and rooms were swimming in a river, ankle-deep, then rising to my hips by the time I found my mother. She told me we needed to get to the other side of the Central Hallway of this house, then we'd come out into the highest room in the house. I sloshed into this corridor, which to my surprise was shaped like a cylinder, curved on all surfaces, narrow and small, and filling rapidly with water. I swam through the hallway behind my mother as the water came within inches of the roof. She pulled me out and through around the bend into the next room before the water trapped me inside.
