Dreaming, Then and Again

Last week, in a hotel in Connecticut, I had one of those dreams that inexplicably finds a way to linger in your head, the trivialities of wakefulness failing to wash it away as the sun washes away the night.

The part I remember starts in a network of large cabins in a generic forest, where people I knew and some I didn't had been gathered. Each had been brought there from different home realities, realities where they had emerged as the main characters, the fullest and most heroic permutations of themselves. In other realities, they had died, or shrank from the glare of capital-D Destiny, and there they remained, uninvited to this mysterious place.

But something was wrong. A slumbering beast was awakened, perhaps out of necessity, and it set about cleansing this hub world. Those that were deemed unworthy by some unspecified criterion were turned to ash, not unlike what I had seen in recent ads for a movie about malevolent invisible aliens. Some shrugged as it happened, knowing that some place else, a different version of them was safe from this beast. The beast, slighted, changed tactics, now stopping people mid-disintegration, taking their feet but leaving the rest of them, screaming, terrified. The dream was suddenly very unhappy.

People fled, and in the ambitious geography of dreams, the woods turned into a vast harbor, where fleets upon fleets of boats and ships were moored. The group I was with -- left blurred and underdeveloped by my dreaming mind but likely composed of waking-life friends -- ran down the maze of piers, looking for an adequate boat, knowing we would be safe on the water as the world behind us crumbled away. Other groups in boats sped by, ignoring any calls for help. Somewhere in my sleeping mind, I rolled my eyes. This was turning into an apocalyptic cliche.

We found a boat. It was a good size, sturdy, but we panicked at the absence of fresh water aboard it. We searched and searched as we drifted by numerous empty boats, passed over by other refugees due to some unrevealed shortcoming. And then we found one covered by a blue plastic tarp, filled with 5-gallon jugs of Sparkletts and 24-packs of Poland Spring bottled water, a twisted liquid Costco at the edge of the sea in the middle of my slumbering mind. We took what we needed and left the rest for others, determined not to succumb to the kind of reckless inhumanity we'd seen in too many movies and read in too many books. We pushed off and headed for deeper waters, worried, scared, but hopeful for a future in the end of the world.


I woke up shivering, having left my arms and shoulders out of the covers, exposed to the Connecticut winter that had snuck in throughout the night.

Weird, I remember thinking, I can still recall it. Dreams usually slipped away from me as the circuits in my brain blinked awake. But this one hung around, leaving a strand for me to grasp onto if I so chose. Offering to let me have it.

I reached out and took hold of it, if only because I could. And maybe if I could hold on to this one, I could hold on to others yet to come.