◎ Various Dreams; Just for Fun

I had some very interesting dreams last night, again. Another cluster of various sorts of themes and happenings:

1) There was a dream where I was with a young woman, and I was also younger, and she was trying to convince me that I needed to help her to free our community of slaves. We were all living underground and we spent our entire lives there. We never questioned it because we assumed that everyone else lived underground, too, and the there was no such thing as an above-ground area, because Earth, I guess, was some sort of Borg... sphere, or something. Anyway, I loved her like a sister, we had been friends my whole life, and though I was shy and reserved, I was happily being led around by her energy and feist. I admired her and didn't want her to get into trouble alone, either. So I told her that if she could prove that there was something above ground, that I would follow her. So, after we watched various people walk away after having a conference of some kind, where we were serving them, we watched the upper-middle crust walk out of the room but stayed hidden as they locked the doors. She led us quickly to a spot in the ceiling where there was a window (a luxury I had not seen before) and we climbed up the wall via various decorations and carvings that jutted out enough for us to do so. She pushed on the window and we climbed up through it with each other's help just as a great metal hatch closed behind us. At first I was unconvinced. The sky was incredible, and blue, and vast, but it took me coming fully out of the window to see that we were indeed all stowed beneath the ground, and that there were rolling hills and fields with trees for miles in all directions-- and there were even a few people who seemed to make their lives there. I was frozen by this realisation. I was shocked. I was filled with sudden purpose, that we must do everything we could to make people aware, to bring people above. My friend was pleased with my reaction, and took my hand to show/introduce me to various people who lived in close proximity to the window, whose job was secrecy as they manned the large hatch that led from below to above. 

When I started to wake up, I started thinking of the idea of the Omelas-- that people above were only living in a paradise because of the people living below. I also wondered how one is supposed to walk away from the false utopia, if you are part of that thing that sustains it. If you are "It", and not someone walking away in righteousness from injustice against someone else, but out of injustice against yourself. My waking mind whispers but I have not had enough time yet to process the meaning or implications.   

2) The next dream I was on a field trip I've been hoping to plan for a while with various people from my church to try to facilitate bonds between parents and children. It was a fun sort of tree-top adventure somewhere not too far away, and one of the activities was this enormous wooden lift, that spun as it went up through the trees to get to a higher elevation. I sat on the floor of the spinning platform, which was entirely safe and the children were enjoying immensely. I, however, was trying to keep my composure because though they were walking fine, I was getting knocked over from the centrifugal force. As I sat on the floor, I was somewhat concerned about whether there were spiders under the copious piles of leaves around me, but I was doubly concerned that if I tried to move the leaves, I was also bound to find one. Just as I thought this, of course, the guide told me that there was an enormous dead spider that had caught on my sweater. And worse, it had somehow tumbled into my sleeve. Through extreme force of will I held my breath and tried to shake its carcass out from my sleeve and keep my composure, because I am often quite concerned with accidentally passing on phobias to children, and I managed to get it out. I didn't bother looking, I could just feel it was gone, and went on with the ride. The kids didn't notice.  

3) Something romantic, to lift my heart and live in my back pocket. 

4) I was sitting in a tide pool with a man and his son. The man was trying to teach his son to fish. The son was only an infant on his lap, and the man had no pole, only a bait on a line, with a reel in his hand. He sat on a rock and threw the bait out into the deepest direction he could, and something caught immediately. He showed his son how to reel, and the child suddenly seemed a little older than a toddler, but was excited for his dad. The father reeled some more, and gave tips about when to pull, when to let it slack, etc. Throughout the dream, I briefly inhabited the man, and the fish, but not the child. Most of the time I watched from a nearby rock, and eventually the man pulled an enormous fish from the water. It was not one I've ever seen in real life, though I suppose it could be said that it was the shape of what you would consider a "standard" fish, with the addition of walrus-level obesity. The fish was scarred from many hooks over the years, and indeed, it seemed that he only let himself be caught because he knew the man. In all ways, from his dark grey, elephant-like skin, to his general expression, he was entirely fed-up with the man and with his lot in life, to almost a comedic degree. He laid on shore while the man pulled the hook from his mouth and showed his son various more things about fishing, and I could feel the deep existential sigh of the fish who was just waiting to be thrown back in to start the cycle again.