the world becomes still as I stand and watch

I have been avoiding this. I have always wondered what the depths hold, and when I catch a glimpse, I most often feel overwhelmed. When all I see is tangled mess, I become frustrated. I want to know. But when I get the chance, I see such an immense truth I become frozen with fear. 

A few nights ago, I had the most profound dream I have ever had in my life. Everything that held meaning in my being has dropped all logic; I slid down the snake, back to square one, and am once again faced with climbing my ladders. Writing helps, but only so much. Here is my dream, my fear and quite possibly the inevitable. 

The longest dream I can remember. Starts at the public pool near my Calgary home. I was attending a birthday party for a little girl. Several years ago I knew this girl, today, she is not so little. The party is over, and I drive my car, affectionately named Daizy, down the lane, towards home. The traffic is stopped by a single policeman, no one is getting through. People are out of their cars, arguing to be let past. I drive up over the curb, as I continue through, my car transforms into a motorized cart. I get the feeling something is very wrong, the traffic cop is not letting out details. I become very concerned to find my sister, Eden. I am driving towards my house, and two boys are running through the streets and alleys. I get home, but the building is a department store. My cart becomes a bicycle as I pedal around asking the sales girls where my sister is. I finally see her in the staff lounge, they are watching TV or looking out the windows that make up an entire wall. I hug her and she feels my concern.

 Comet fragments are blasting the back yard and through the glass as all the people inside cower. I pull Eden around the corner to take cover behind a brick wall as a blaze of fire fills the room and is gone just as quickly. Everyone is very afraid. Eden is wounded, and has an infection. She plays it off, but I know she is starting a fever. I sip fish tank water, and offer her some. She rejects it. As I spit the water out, I wonder why I just did that. We are listening to an old fashion radio, like from the 1950's, scrolling though several channels, finding news. It seems that Japan has been wiped out by one of the first comets, and the rest of the world is expecting their turn. 

The next part has become a bit hazy, but the brick wall we took cover against has turned into a staircase. A boy I knew once is sitting on the second stair, looking morose. The store has become a woman's home, and she is very frazzled. She has a random scrap of paper, and is walking around accusing people. She confronts me and demands an answer, I look at the paper. It is a restaurant survey, or a golf card, or a list of coupons. Something trivial. I shrug her off and walk to the window over looking the road below. There is activity on the street. Men collecting rations, setting up road blocks, army trucks transporting emergency supplies and other men. 

As I look through the slats in the blinds, the sky has become a foreign sight. The comets have destroyed our atmosphere, and I can see outer space. A few patches of blue remain where the oxygen is leaking into to the great black expanse. My Canon Elph 800, a thing I call Gustav, has a super zoom lens, and I am taking photos of the sky. I feel like I am recording history for the few people that may survive. An accepting sadness creeps over and engulfs my soul. I think of all the people I love and will never see again. My parents enter my mind, my younger brother Jordy, My best friend Ally, and the one my heart longs for on the other side of the globe. I wonder what they are doing in their last moments and if they are thinking of me, I hope it doesn't cause them to worry and waste their final breaths in frenzied gasps. 

Up above, there are hundreds of thousands of comet tails filling the sky, some closer than others. I feel the world coming to an end, and I stand there taking photos on a digital camera. Once the battery dies, the electricity runs out, the photos cannot be seen. I think to myself, "I can't handle this anymore..." I wake up.

In the weeks and days following this dream, I contemplate the logic of our lives. I can't shake the feelings of loss, of sadness or the feeling that I have a chance to drastically change what I am doing right now. The networks we have built for ourselves, the grocery stores importing food from other countries, the gasoline at the fuel stations trucked in, the electricity traveling through the lines to each house. Once these inputs are interrupted, the goods run out, luxury shrivels and is forgotten. What would North America be like, if all our systems collapse? We have become so comfortable in our daily lives, how would we cope? With all our 'superior' technology, we cannot save ourselves from the nature of the universe. A few films have also explored this idea, the first coming to mind is The Day After Tomorrow. After I woke, I thought of the movie The Postman. Even though, in this story, the destruction of the world has come from war, there is a vivid sense of how people barely survive after the worst. 

This dream makes me scrutinize my values. That gorgeous dress in the shop window is useless in this scenario, money is only as good as the paper it is printed on, perhaps would burn for a few minutes providing scant warmth. The greatest tool we have is knowledge, ideas and thought. Our wit would be all we had to survive once the comets stopped pelting our home. We focus so much on the material, and leave little concern for mental growth.  And very few seem to understand that, very few people care. This irks me about the modernity, about North America.

 The greatest lessons we learn will come from chaos and loss. I am afraid of that day, but perhaps acknowledge that the true strength of the human race will only be found when every 'thing' is lost. 

monstrous problems

I was at my parents farm. Everywhere we went, there was conflict. Out in the pasture, we were competing against something, another man, wild animals. I kept shifting places on the farm, but I stayed as myself for the whole dream. Corey and I were hiding by the deck on the south side, when a gigantic T-rex ran by the house on the road. We weren't quite hidden, and I was very afraid. I had my camera with me, I wanted to take a photo of the dinosaur, but was afraid the flash would attract its attention. We slowly crept closer to the deck to become fully hidden, the t-rex had ran past, but somehow it became aware of us, and turned back to come after us. I haven't been this afraid in a dream for a long time. It was unnerving.  

missed yesterday

I was in my room, in bed. My furniture was shifted and my closet was missing. Lindsay, my long lost friend, was in bed with me. I was surprised to see her. I went to the bathroom to pee, and some how dripped blood down the outside of the toilet. The porcelain shifted into an arcade game, and the blood was on the coin intake. I was in a half empty small town western bar, and there was a guy acting like a jerk at the counter, making fun of me for making a mess. I wiped the machine clean and I was really annoyed at the man. The scene shifted to a corral. I've been in this place before, a bull was chasing me, I was up on the fences trying to escape but he kept following me, butting the fence, my family watched from afar, helpless. Except in this dream, the bull was chasing after a man. I was straddling the fence, watching the man and animal. I was concerned for the man, I was watching every move, tense, waiting for the bull to go crazy. 

pause

No dreams for a couple days. The past couple nights must have been useless info dumps!

I'm expanding my focus on dreams, into fairy tales, myth, tarot and human archetype. They all seem related. Hmmm....

airplane

Short dream last night. 

My mother, father, brother and two high school friends went to the Didsbury Area together. My parents went to watch whatever was on the ice, my 2 friends, Jen and Kendra supposedly went to watch as well. Jordy and I stayed in the lobby and were building and coloring and cutting paper. It was time to leave, the girls were no where in sight. I told my mom if they weren't back in 5 minutes we were leaving. I called, Kendra said they had gone for a walk and they would be back very soon. I was very annoyed. Jordy had built an airplane, the wings stretched so wide, two of us needed to hold the doors open so he could make it out with the plane intact. He was so proud of it. We left without the girls. I didn't realize until I had woken up, that they didn't return in my dream.

creating change

Even though posting every single day became a bit of a drag, looking back, I see the worth of my blog. I've been researching dream interpretation, themes and symbols making many of my nocturnal musings become clear. My acceptance on such matters is clearing mind space, allowing room for other creative thoughts. I am pleased with this. I am starting to see a progression of a journey. Before I started blogging, my dreams were most often about haunted buildings or a being hidden below the surface of a lake. Buildings and sometimes bodies of water represent human body. Now, most dreams frequently involve travel, transformation of myself or others, people I know or knew, home. Suggestively, I long for change, but still desire some roots or stabilitiy during the process. Here is my dream from last night.
fragments, transformation. The road is very icey on the highway 2 north, passing Innisfail, I am riding a imitation skateboard using a wallpaper scraper to remove the ice on the ashphault. There are people waiting to get through and I am happy to be plowing the road. Shift into a strange place, a strange house but my family and many cousins are all there. There is some kind of mini disaster, a blackout maybe, and we are cold, wrapped in blankets sitting down in the basement, but we are watching something on a TV perhaps. Muddled... My mom wants me to come downstairs and eventually, I grudgingly agree. I am not happy. I leave in a vehicle. It is dark out, but there are a few street lights or spot lights here and there. Driving down an alley, I find my car Daizy parked haphazardly in a man's backyard. A cute little dog is in the car. I let her out. I go inside to find Corey with a friend, an old man with a name I can't remember, but it is important. I tell him I let the dog out to pee because he left it in the car.

return

Wow! 20 days of absence. Some nights I would wake and not remember any dreams, other nights, I would remember a few then they would vanish right away. I think I needed some time to stabilize after thinking so deeply into my pysche. Ok, deep breath, here we go again.

Shifting perspective. I was in a sea plane flying across the ocean looking for survivors. I saw two orange life jackets with people in them. As the plane flew over and around to land, I was now in the water with the floating people. A man and a woman swam over to help us to the plane, we swam through coral mounds and my legs were getting scratched and poked by plants that felt like wire. The plane had turned into a small triangular tent, and we squeezed many people in. I don't know where they all came from, but there were several people to save. We left a dinghy behind, full of people, we were meant to come back later to rescue them. The tent tried to take off, wouldn't go. We circled around into more open water, it was very choppy. We took off and made it into the air. Wires kept poking me through the tent walls. I was looking through the window and the man in front of me was now Adam Dingman. We were talking about getting home. We flew over a private island, turned into a public beach, then we were in a bus driving through Didsbury past a BBQ, and a wedding. The driver was joking about forgetting to phone our parents, to tell them we were saved. We turned up the alley, and the bus once again transformed into a sled, and we were moving up a snowy hill. I was looking through my bag of random things- fake grapes, toy balls, bottles, glass ornaments, etc. A boy was playing fetch with his dog. I took the ball from the dog's mouth and threw it, he brought it back then I woke up.

I don't understand why I keep dreaming about my home town Didsbury. And people from my past. Maybe I have roots to shake...