After the Flood: A Dream

Awoke this Friday morning after a particularly bizarre and unsettling dream. Parts of it felt nightmarish, other parts funny, and yet the dream was so adventurous. Gigantic waves rose up as the sky turned dark. We partied among tomorrow’s ruins with everyone we all knew earlier in life, suddenly aware terrifying alien creatures scurried quickly in the shadows. What was this crazy dream trying to tell me? 

The dream didn’t start out so scary. The dreamtime seemed to be soon after my middle daughter Kate’s wedding. In real-life Kate is engaged to marry Ian the Boatman next year in the Summer of 2026. Some people in the dream were still running around in wedding attire. The dreamtime was Autumn. Had a mid-to-late Octobery feel. And the nights felt somewhere between warm and cool. With a Full Moon. So looked up Luna cycles in real-life. In the Fall of 2026 the Full Moon soars on Monday the 6th of October as the Harvest or Hunter’s Supermoon, on Wednesday the 5th of November as the Beaver Supermoon, and on Thursday the 4th of December as the Full Cold Moon Supermoon.

So many people were in this dream. There were folks I knew and know from across many walks of life and from different periods of time. There were people from every place I’ve ever lived. Even people who had passed on in real-life who I was surprised to see still alive in the dream. Family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, classmates, fraternity brothers, ex-wives, even old girlfriends and schoolyard chums including those I got into fights with – they were all there. They were also all older adults, no one here was still a child or still dead, but more as if we were all peers, alive. We’re all about the same age in this dream. No one was elderly or very young. Twas all in the near future, could be this year, or during the Autumn of next year.

Early on while dreaming, I wondered if we were all in the Afterlife together. Did we all perish in a sudden, unexpected cataclysm where our species became extinct? And now we were in Heaven, or maybe Purgatory or some low-level, close-to-the-ground-of-Earth astral realm because everything was so post-Apocalyptic? The idea we were all in Hell, every one of us, didn’t make sense. And then we realized we were biologically all alive but in some different dimension or density or strange realm. We were unable to understand any of it. All of these people being together, alive, and at the same age, at the same time was a miracle, a Discordian miracle none of us were able to make any sense out of it.

Next we’ve broken into small groups scrambling thru different ruined houses amidst a landscape muddy and trashed from recent flooding. We look around in house after house, all of them empty, no one living there. Everyone I saw were only the people I’ve known across my 66 years of living in real-life time. Someone shouted. We stopped to listen. Monster waves bigger than tsunamis were on the way. We grabbled surfboards – they just appeared in our hands – and headed out into the bay. The water was rising quickly. Enormous waves taller than the mountains rose so high as to block out the sky. We’re calm, which surprises me within the dream. Most of us sit astride our surfboards while some swim about not wanting to be tethered to anything. The gigantic waves pass beneath us, lifting us up into the sky, then dropping us down as the water barreled ashore. We all began to freak out, and fear turns to relief and then, strangely, a sense of fun. None of us are hurt. We don’t drown. We aren’t smashed to bits. It was as if we were somehow indestructible. Again, I wondered if we were somehow in some strange realm of the Afterlife, a House of Many Rooms of which we Earth Humans all know so little. Continue reading