soul_shards ovenbird Nearly every dream I have contains deep bodies of water. These dream oceans plunge all the way down through the midnight zone to the underworld darkness of the hadal zone with a million nightmares in between. If I’m at the surface the water is volatile, often throwing a 100 meter tsunami my way or forcing me to navigate murky, swirling vortexes in boats that are rarely up to the task. Even when my dreams take place on solid ground I tend to encounter puddles that are deeper than they should be, or lakes in places where there shouldn’t be lakes. When I enter a dream world I am entering the water of my subconscious, the raw material that births everything I think and everything I am. It’s a place full of monsters and visions, prophecies and lurking dangers, myth mixed with memory. Certain themes re-emerge over and over again, and some images never rise to the surface even though I wish them to. I was reflecting yesterday that I never dream of people I love that have died. My grandmother, for instance, has never appeared to me in a dream though she is one of the people I have loved most in this world and I would welcome a dream world visit. Last night my subconscious let me access her in a roundabout way. Not the way I would have liked, but in veiled imagery, like looking at something using only your peripheral vision. My dream begins, as usual, with water: I am on a small fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. I can’t see land, but the water is calm and green, like we’re anchored far off the coast of some tropical island. I’m standing on the deck in the bright afternoon sun with about twenty other people and we’re facing a raised platform where an auction is in progress. The auctioneer is dressed in old fashioned garb–a tweed vest, a pocket watch, a top-hat. He is holding aloft a green glazed pottery vessel that once belonged to my grandmother and I know that I must buy it. Another person keeps outbidding me and I’m starting to panic. But eventually the gavel comes down and the pottery is mine. When I am awake and can let my conscious mind comb over the imagery it occurs to me that my dreams are trying to tell me why my grandmother never appears. Death, as a realm, is inaccessible to the living mind so I can’t follow her there and she can’t rise out of death to meet me. What I am left with is memory and legacy. My dreams hand me this small green vase that maybe, just maybe, contains a little piece of her soul. I’m entrusted with it. I fight to keep it with me, to carry it on into the future where my grandmother herself can never go. My cousins and I will be the last people on earth with a living memory of her. She died before my children were born so whatever memories I have are all that is left. I tuck it all inside the body of the green vessel. I try to carry my grandmother’s soul into the morning. The birds are singing loudly today. I know that she would go outside and call them by name. So I throw open the door, and do the same. 250415 ... epitome of incomprehensibility ovenbird, this is intriguing as well as beautiful! ...Excuse the careworn adjectives, but I'm always fascinated by the way dreams reflect experiences and states of mind. The sentence that stood out the most to me was this: "When I enter a dream world I am entering the water of my subconscious, the raw material that births everything I think and everything I am." I guess it's because the prevailing style and tone of my dreams are quite different from the ones you describe here...and yet I also get the image of water. For me, deeper water represents deeper sleep. Sometimes this is more feeling than image. Sometimes I want to dive in, sometimes to emerge. Sometimes I stop to notice how I can I breathe underwater. In one of the breathing-underwater dreams, I stopped to theorize that this ability was because of a special layer of bubbles called the "rastaferrugian layer" - a word that randomly incorporated "Rastafarian" but whose meaning leaned more towards "fer" (iron). Minerals causing bubbles. ... Tentatively, my waking mind theorizes that the tone and tenor of people's dreams reflects aspects of their personality. At the same time, I felt a little...diminished?...when David (the ex I've been moping over, but this when we were still together) emphasized the silliness of my dreams. To be fair, it only struck me as diminishing a couple of times. Other times, he said a similar thing in a charming way. "Inherently comic," he called me. "You're an inherently comic writer." "You're an inherently comic dreamer." "You're an inherently comic ______er." He wasn't entirely wrong. My dreams often have a layer of humour (the mineral that causes the bubbles, maybe!) even when they're also sad or anxious. But I need to breathe! To take a breather (an inherently comic breather) and humour helps me deal with real life. ... All that to say, I *do* see dead people, but in a silly way. I think I wrote this in "Grandpa": at one point I saw my grandfather in a dream and scolded him with something like, "Grandpaaaa, you're supposed to be dead." "Oh, sorry," he said, and walked away apologetically. It wasn't that I was afraid of ghosts or that I disliked him in real life. It was probably one of those dreams where I didn't know I was dreaming and so I was annoyed that things weren't quite normal. If my mind had been either deeper or shallower in dream-water, I might have reacted differently. He was a comforting presence and I miss him. Hm. It just occurred to me that *he* would have probably laughed at that dream; he had his fair share of silliness too. Maybe that scene was a soul shard in its own way: my memory of his personality. We're all a little bit everyone else, maybe. Not entirely, but a little bit. ... I'm not super mystical in everyday life, but when I was a kid I had the idea that people were in heaven before they were born. Were somewhere, at least. I also had a pantheon of gods that included kids from my elementary school. I had a ritual for Earth Day: I would march around the backyard with sticks. Were these things at all connected? Syncretistic? Was my childhood religion more Christian, pagan, or unknowingly Buddhist? Maybe Buddhist with Rastafarian bubbles. See, the West gigglingly focuses on the weed, but to be *actually* high-minded, we need to notice the iron-infused bubbles. Anyway. A childhood idea of a shared life pool, later remixed into a sense of universal consciousness. Maybe that's why the Presbyterian doctrine of foreshadowing didn't take. (Ha, I meant "predestination" right there, but "foreshadowing" is too funny to correct. The Presbyterian doctrine of foreshadowing!!) 250415 what's it to you? who go blather from