Dreams

We all dream of ourselves…especially when we dream of houses, or places we live.

I’ve several places I return to in my dreams repeatedly.

One is a wild spring that feeds into a river and every time I dream of it it’s different. Sometimes it’s being overrun by destructive humans.

Sometimes it’s wild and free.

Sometimes people are just discovering it and in the beginning moments of running it over with their trash and footprints.

I cry and scream to save it, to make it disappear into wilder places no person has a right to visit. I break my own heart with the battle of it all, and wake with leaking eyes.

I’ve places with huge old growth trees as big around as my house.

My grandparents home, but in a dream not in life. Different.

And I almost always can fly in my dreams.

When I was younger, it was difficult to fly. I pressed against the winds, arched my back and neck, strained my arms and legs to remain aloft. I could never get very high, rarely above the height of a one story building. It was hard and my arms in my sleep wouldn’t push as hard as they needed to get me higher.

I’d fly to nightmarish landscapes, be taunted by the dead or dying, be followed by evil horrific men capable of monstrosities.

When I drank myself to sleep every day I didn’t dream. It was blessed black and blank oblivion. But I missed flying. So much.

Four years into sobriety and now I attain heights I’d never been able to when I was younger. I don’t strain, flight is much easier to achieve, the winds hold me close and bring me to the bellies of clouds, through the arms of sunshine, kissing the tops of trees, lips to leaves.

I left the cult I was raised in ten years ago now, over ten years actually, and my nightmares have disappeared. No longer am I chased in horror by disgusting men who bid me harm. By spectres of mistakes and misery begging me for peace. They have gone now.

In dreams I try to reclaim my family, the home I built with my parents, but I am refused even entry. Even when I can see in the windows and see it’s abandoned, they won’t let me wander its halls. I walked away from it willingly long ago and have no rights to it anymore.

And nightmares have no rights to me. I am my own. I belong to my Self, to the trees as big around as a skyscraper, to the winds who I speak to in the waking world, and how they do listen. They’ve known me since I was a child singing to them before the cult beat my spirit into submission. They know my true name, play with my hair when I step outside. I hear them call me through the leaves of trees and sand storms.

The waking world isn’t so far from the dreaming, after all. We only think there is a distinction between the two, but they are one and the same. They reflect one another in every plane of consciousness, if we but look.