The Dream

This afternoon I laid down in pure exhaustion and fell into a deep three and half hour Sunday nap.

As the hours slipped by, I began to toss and turn. My room sweltered in the mid-July heat and beads of sweat pealed down from my hairline, cascading over my eyelid and quivering on the side of my nose. I woke periodically, turning over on my side to banish the distressing, murky dreams still fresh in my momentarily conscious mind.

I fell again into the quiet darkness of the unconscious. And suddenly everything became very clear. Clear and cool and bright, a sparkling pitcher of freshly stirred lemonade compared to the grainy coffee of my previous dreams. I was crossing a stream.

The current looked benign and the water seemed deep enough only to graze the bottoms of my knees. I took a step, and then another, delicately tip-toeing over the smooth but jutting pebbles covering the creek bottom. And then I was swept under.

It happened just like that. I had no fear of getting caught by a current and no foresight that sudden danger was ahead. I certainly had no idea of the seemingly sudden depth and darkness of the creek. My entire body was submerged and I hung suspended, weightless like a spaceman, face turned skyward beneath the surface of the water.

Shimmering sunlight filtered down towards me and I caught glimpses of trees and the sky as I was rushed along the creek's frantic course. The lack of oxygen was suffocating me; I felt as though a pillow was pressed against my mouth and nose. Every part of me screamed to fight the current, to break the surface, but I could no longer feel my limbs. Totally physically incapacitated, I was as helpless as a rag doll mistakenly caught in a whirlpool.

I thought of my friends and family on the creek shore. They could pull me out, but I doubted whether they could see me, and if they could, whether they could catch up with the distance the current had already swept me.

My head spun yet I refrained from the urge to inhale water. It was a losing battle. My heart seemed to swell up into my throat and the reflex to breathe became more and more undeniable.

And then, I burst from the water just as instantaneously as I had been pulled in. My eyes immediately flew open and I awoke. It was as though my only escape from the watery depths was in the conscious world.

One could psychoanalyze my dream. It would be easy to derive apparent fears and insecurities from this strange sequence.

But I can only think of the invisible power that lifted me from the depths and endowed me with new life-giving air when I had nothing else.