well my dream goal totally backfired. I wanted to fly over blue waters, find something in the water below, and drop in on some other time and place to learn a lesson. (I just finished reading the book One, by Richard Bach. If you’ve read it, you probably understand, if not then not.) But I had this fleeting thought ‘what if I’m scared to go into the water because of sharks or something?’ Anyway, here’s the dream, or the stuff I recall anyway.
I’m going into this swimming pool. At first I’m just swimming with other people. I’m swimming with some little girl, tossing her up, help making sure she doesn’t drown, etc. Then I start to swim around underwater, thinking it would be funny to swim up and brush by people’s legs to creep them out or something. BUt when I’m underwater, I see something. Now that I think of it, one of the things I saw was a seagull! (Jonathan?) I also saw a couple cute little seals, they were white and they mostly sat on the bottom, and they’d let me swim right up and pet them. So I spent quite some time swimming around, and the longer I did, the more cool animals and stuff I found. There was some animal I was actually looking for but I can’t remember what it was. All I remember is that I knew it was a fast swimmer, and that it could probably tell when someone was close by the vibration of the water, so he probably bailed quickly which was why I never saw him.
Then, as time passed, I was swimming near the top for awhile. THe water got darker. I was still in an enclosed swimming pool, but now it’s like an indoor pool, and the walls are really close to the edge of the pool. The pool seems murky I guess. Every once in awhile, I feel one of the seals or something brush my legs. I’m swimming back and forth, I’m a little creeped out but mostly I’m just ready to get out and I’m trying to figure out how and where to go. I’m the only person left. Something big brushes me from underneath and even lifts me out of the water a bit. This scares me. This is a swimming pool about the size at Gresham high. I start swimming near the edge. I pull myself up onto the edge, there’s barely enough room for a foothold. I creep around the edge and eventually find a door and a way out.
Once I’m out in the lobby type area, I’m stomping around in the mud so I dip my feet back in the pool to get rid of the mud. The person (working there, I guess) tells me ‘good job! The whale hardly seemed to bother you until he lifted you right at the end there’. WHALE?! What the fuck!? Then I begin to recall. I was in some ‘game’, where at first it’s people in the water, after a few minutes there are also seals, a few more and a new animal appears, etc, all the way up to a whale that takes up about 1/3 of the pool and barely has room to swim. And here’s the part that really freaks me out, the feeling of being brushed up against, now I know that each time, it was the whale, not a different animal. It happened over and over and I had no idea, and I’m really freaked out that I just swam with a whale, touched it several times.
Anyway, my ride is here, and Beth and Emmett. Now I think Beth is the one who had told me good job, and she tells Emmett to let my driver know that I can have a cookie. So Emmett walks me out, hands the driver a bag of lay’s potato chips, and says “he may have a cookie”. I’m laughing, partly because there are no cookies, only a bag of chips, but Emmett of course says exactly what he’s told so it looks like he’s calling the chips cookies.
So I’m riding along and there’s mud on my shoes. But quickly, it switches and I’m not in a car but some type of plane. Not even a plane, really. It’s more like I’m sitting on a bench. Emmett is the driver/pilot. We’re flying on a bench, our legs dangling freely in the air, just sitting comfortably. Emmett is talking about something really smart. We bump into things from time to time, but as long as you hit it to one side, we just sort of slide off and keep going, no problem. He warns me though, not to hit something squarely so I’m trying to dodge. We’re way up with the clouds. All of a sudden something small is approaching fast, and we don’t have time to dodge. It’s a blue bird! It has hit Emmett’s foot, and it’s hanging on for dear life!
Emmett says “now that you don’t see every day!” He gently pries the bird off of his ankle, but tries to get the bird to just hang on to his arm or finger. THe bird doesn’t seem to want to. Then Emmett says “here, watch this.” He gets up, and steps off, falling. But on the way down, he grabs onto my foot. In fact, he doesn’t even grab, he just nonchalantly sort of hooks his arm around my foot, and hangs there like that game with the red plastic monkeys. We’re flying high in the air, and Emmett is just dangling from my feet, like it’s no big deal! But then a funny thing happens, the bird returns, and dangles on Emmett the way he’s dangling on me, and Emmett says “ha! I knew it would work!”.
All of a sudden David Olson is sitting there next to me, he must have been on the other side of Emmett. He sees Emmett, the bird and I playing the monkey game, and without saying a word, he decided to join in so he just hops off the flying bench. But when he grabs for Emmett, he misses, and he just begins to freefall.
For a moment I’m in shock. Emmett says something, again nonchalantly. Like “would you look at that. Hmm.” But he doesn’t even hop back up, he just keeps enjoying his ride. And I say “but I don’t know what to do.” So he says "oh, that’s easy. Just put it in freefall. All of our weight will cause us to drop faster than David, so when we get just under him, we just move below him and he can rejoin us. So I don’t know how I do it but all of a sudden we are all freefalling as well, magic bench and all. Very slowly, we are getting down to David’s level, but he’s still below us.
All of a sudden, in an instant, I notice how close we are to the ground. I have about a half a second to even say anything, as I see ground, road, grass, burger king. I think we’re right near some little shopping center like the one in Gresham with BK, GI Joes, Emporium, etc. The words I say, as fast as that, are:
“uh oh, we’re gonna land first!!!”
BAM. I know we were completely freefalling, and it took us a good minute or longer to drop. There is absolutely no way anyone could survive a drop like that. But the impact didn’t really hurt, just jarred us a bit. And in between the time that we saw that we were close to ground and the time that we actually hit, we didn’t even have a chance to get scared. We just hit, and, I think, died.
We all sat there, calm and unhurt. Emmett says “don’t worry about it, happens all the time. This time, it just happened to us. Think of it like role-playing.”
I wake up.
I need to think about this one for awhile. There definitely IS a message here. Maybe my dream goal was a success. Maybe, I’m going to die and there’s nothing to fear about that.