The Transformation
My camera usually can't see red flowers. It did today, along with the brown sludge crawling out of the bird bath.
I was at an academy in the northeast with a guy named Mike. I changed vantage points throughout the length of the dream, sometimes just an observer, sometimes playing different people. He was the main thread of the dream.
He began as a self-assured and successful candidate, but not someone who listened and cooperated, not a team player. He was able to make progress to a point, then began to stagnate. And there, he ran into trouble. Some of his actions encouraged bad behavior in others who could less afford the consequences.
The environment was highly stressful, competitive, with daily ocean drills and military-like conduct during instruction. The guy got into enough trouble over a handgun one day that he was kicked out of his group. This sent him into a personal crisis.
He seemed to have lost his identity and he wandered without finding a stable place for a while, still at the school, but not a part of things. Then he went through a transformation, the trigger of which was only vaguely hinted at. He began to write everything, where once he was all mouth and action. He was completely focused and studied.
This gained him notice and he was asked to be part of a cheerleading team. While it seemed not a part of who he was at all, he accepted and began to train with them. About this time, the location changed to become Harvard. Maybe relevant, maybe because of something I’d seen during the day, before bed.
I headed to a series of tennis matches being held nearby. The cheerleaders didn’t cheer so much as act as ushers for the large crowds that rolled into the area to watch the competition. The place was an elongated appendix-shaped cut into the woods, somewhat near the ocean, but it wasn’t visible from the area.
Throngs of people walked in and took their seats at courts erected in the fields. The courts were hard or clay, with short metal bleachers for the observers. Mike saw me and told me I was to go to the green court. As far as I could tell, there was a blue and a green, but there were many other courts, so these were more like section colors.
I was headed to a specific game when the guy’s new girlfriend appeared at my side. She said she understood I was his former girlfriend and wanted to ask me some questions. This immediately made me nervous. Any allegiance I felt I had was to him, not to her, but there had been some extraordinary circumstances in his life and I was witness to them. He never spoke about them. He wasn’t the person he used to be any longer.
She began to ask me about him and I answered her briefly. Something caught my attention. I looked to the far end of the line of courts and felt something was wrong. I told her to run for the trees. There were many trees with all of their low branches cut away, but this left crooked trunks with some jutting stumpy limb pieces, which made handholds and rests and left them easier to climb.
I pulled myself up the first tree, then felt in my stomach the need to locate her and make sure she was safe, for him. But I looked over my shoulder as I was yelling to her and she was already up in a tree a few yards away. A tidal wave came rushing in through the break in the trees, sweeping away everything as it moved. We all yelled to one another to climb higher.
Where the water met the bushes and trees, it turned into a chocolate brown color, topped with roiling foam. It didn’t look like a lot of water. It didn’t tower over our heads, but it seemed to take away everything smaller than the trees it hit and I stopped looking.
I’d tried to climb higher in the tree and was sitting on a very small ledge where a large branch had been trimmed away not quite flush with the trunk. I wrapped my arms around the trunk and held on like crazy. Eventually, I heard rescue come and still wouldn’t open my eyes. The water receded. I felt someone grab my foot and nearly panicked. I pulled away and yelled for them to not pull on my feet.
I heard Mike call up to me and tell me it was all ok now. I looked down over my right shoulder and saw him below me, far below, far enough to fall and get hurt. Then I looked at the tree and saw that there were little treasures in hollows and crooks. Some were piles of candy. One was an open book. I looked down at the book and read the first couple of lines of the story. It was about Mike and what had happened to him to cause his transformation. And something about reading them caused me to change, too. I closed my eyes again and felt it happen, physical movements inside my belly. I wanted to read the rest of the page, but felt like I could see it without opening my eyes.
Mike propped a ladder against the tree and climbed up, talking in a soothing voice. This time when he touched my foot, I didn’t freak out. I said I’d climb down on my own and I did, without the ladder. I wasn’t afraid to let go. On the ground, he seemed to recognize that special something in me now that he had in him and he began to walk with me, leaving his girlfriend behind.
In the middle of this dream, I had other dreams, including one where I went night fishing. I realised I didn’t want to catch and harm the fish. I stuck my flashlight in the water and found I could see them all down there. I was going to fish that way from then on, except I accidentally snagged a bluegill. I realised I could remove the hook better and without hurting him as much if I cut off the tip, then it would be more like a piercing and not tear his flesh. Then I thought all hooks should be treated that way (although, really, no one should be fishing).
I have nowhere else relevant to stick this, so, a tidbit: I had a dream last week of a cat with ivy leaves growing out of the tips of its hair.
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