Oxygen

Last night I had my first really great dream since being in India.  Normally, I dream epics on a regular basis, so the dearth has been significant.

I was in a boat of some size.  It felt tugboatish in shape, but not in aesthetic design.  There were several of us living on this boat.  We were in the Pacific Ocean, which in dreamland began where the locks empty from Lake Union into Puget Sound.  There was a giant wave coming toward us, towering over us.  I knew it wouldn’t break on us.  Instead our boat was carried back into Lake Union.  The captain, who was also my husband, took us, then, even further up stream and found a place to anchor our boat where the rising tides of the ocean would be less volatile and dangerous to us.  There were so many boats doing the same thing that we became a boat island.

The Captain became ill from exhaustion.  So we lived in the boat village for a while until he recovered.

Eventually we had to venture onto land to search for something.  In the dream, I did not know what we were looking for, only that we were a party sent ahead to search.

We walked through empty residential streets.  No one was living on the land.  The only signs of life that we encountered were solar lights that were shinning very brightly in the yards, even in daytime.  The sun was strong; the air was thick with smog.

Suddenly, in a yard where there were trees we caught sight of children playing.  When they saw us, the kids hid.  We went into the yard, into the grove of trees.  I realized then that these were the first trees I’d seen in a long time.  The children slowly came out.   We asked them what they were doing here, how they were managing to live where no one else could.

They said, “It’s our forest.  It’s the redwoods.”

Then their father, played by Aiden Quinn in my dream (of course), came out of a house.  He was obviously nervous about people discovering that he had managed to keep the redwoods growing and was even cultivating new ones.  I looked around and saw all the baby trees.  The grove had grown into a dark, thick expanse of trees.  On the ground was a sort of by-product of the tree bark that was edible…it fed the family and it fed the Earth.

I was aware then that the air in this stand of trees was pristine, almost pure oxygen.  It was so cooling, soothing and restorative.  The captain told “Aiden Quinn” that we would not tell the other people back on the boats about the forest, not yet.  We would change our route on the map (now there was a map being drawn by one of our search party) so no one would come that way and the trees could grow.

I woke up with the feel of fresh. clean air in my lungs, a feeling I haven’t known since I came to India.