Vivid Dreams

I had what I think was an interesting vivid dream this afternoon. I was trying to nap off the worst of a several day long migraine since I was home and could.

The beginning as I can discern it, I was in the ocean, or I was the ocean, though as a young girl, not myself. There was a boy there, and he asked, "What is your favorite thing in the world?" In the darkness I responded "A Lemon." Perplexed, he asked "What use has the ocean for a lemon?" but I was slipping further into the darkness, and could only repeat "A lemon" in the dream-sleep voice of a young girl.

Then I (in dream)woke, and re-oriented myself with my surroundings. A small room piled high with papers and books, sketchings of people tacked up on the wall, with names scribbled beneath them. This was all from the adventures of an elder sister or mother (I couldn't make sense of the familial connection once awake) with my father. Memories from another world. Names, faces, detailed written notes and journals full of adventures over seas, in never-heard of kingdoms of another world, loyal friends, terrifying battles, all archived in the fragile stacks of paper littering the room. There was a small wooden door on heavy iron hinges, and a single tiny round window in the stone wall with light shining in, above eye level for me.

I didn't have long to sit and wake up before the door opened and my father came into the room speaking excitedly. He'd had a vision-dream and it was time for us to go and have an adventure. He looked old, and sick, and I had the impression that he had a terminal disease and was trying to escape death with fantasy. Even so, I wanted to play along, give him a moment of happiness so I asked him what to do.

He grabbed my hands and started speaking quickly, too quickly for me to make sense of anything, but he pushed my hand against the wall, and told me to make a door. Confused, but wanting to please I focused on my hand and was amazed to see golden light shine from my palm and spread out across the wall to form an arched door, which flashed brightly. Then as suddenly as it started, it stopped, and there was an old looking wooden door with carvings covering every inch of it.

Father hugged me tight and called me a good girl. He said he would be a King and I would be his steward, as he dug in a bag and pulled free a golden staff topped with a mysterious purple stone which he handed to me, and placed a golden headpiece of some intricate weaving on his own head. Right after he did this he pulled the door open and we went through. I remember being amazed and confused, and hoping that he knew what he was doing because I didn't know how to use this magic or what it would do.

On the other side we were in a bustling city, not modern (but neither had the room we came from been) white stone, the ocean in the background. Father drunk it in, and as he did he began to look confused and then angry. He turned to me and asked what I had done. I remember feeling his thoughts and my own in sync, his full of wonder, then listening to the music of the foreign language around us, and then taste of the air, and noting a definite "Italian" feel to the language and land. More than had been there in his previous travels. It felt Not Right. The young girl me was just stunned, and distracted by realizing the door we'd come through was gone when he turned to her to ask what she had done.

I remember staring in confusion and saying that I didn't know. I had displeased him somehow but I didn't know how, as he'd just been praising me for making a door. He dragged me around the town making inquiries in the native language, with a slight accent. I could understand him, and the people around us, but I was aware that we were not speaking in our native tongue, and I had no understanding of why we could speak or understand it.

Finally thoughts in sync but separate again, he determined that Something had happened with ships, and not just locally but throughout the known sea. Determined, but without explaining to me, he pulled me down to the shore and told me we needed to go out to sea.

I remember at that point shape-shifting to a large whale first, something large and easy for Father to sit upon because I feared the excitement and confusion was going to make him sicker. Then after awhile I began to tire, trying to use a foreign body that was so large and took so much energy to move. So, I switched to a Dolphin, and suddenly was greeted with hostility from all the natural fauna. Fish that swam by made scandalized noises at me and asked me how I could do such a thing to the Men of the world. I couldn't speak back to them, and I remained confused and in awe, and decided that being a Dolphin in this ocean seemed like a really bad idea, so I took the form of a Narwhal, hoping that a large mythical creature would be easier to maintain and garner less hostility.

Immediately we were set upon by a ship, the only one we had seen our entire time in this world and just before they threw their harpoons at me I spoke in their tongue, calling out to a face I recognized from the sketchings on the wall of the room from my own world. "Lazzaro" I said, and there was a flurry of activity.

A pale man made his way down to the edge of the ship and pulled my father aboard as I shifted back to a human shaped thing to discover to my horror that with each time I had shifted, my human form began to change. I had noticed the little nubs of spiky horns when I'd gone from Whale to Dolphin (being Human briefly between) but hadn't registered it beyond wondering what it meant before focusing on taking another form quickly so Father didn't have to wear himself out trying to swim. Now the little spikes of horns were much larger and my skin was taking on an unreal quality, very luminescent. 

The man clasped hands with Father and they spoke excitedly and it became apparent this was the very man from the sketchings I had studied. I felt a pang of jealousy, and of fear. I didn't know this world, and I felt like I didn't know my father at all.

As I sat shivering in a puddle, ignored by all but one sailor who draped a blanket over my shoulders I listened to Father speak with his old friend, and learned that Lazzaro and another man whose name I didn't hear was also an old companion and they had gone on an epic journey in my father's youth with my sister(?). They remarked that he was much aged and he said something of time between worlds being erratic.

The man that had put the blanket over my shoulders was speaking to me, and I tried to respond but my accent was very thick, and after a surprised look and his accent changing, I realized I'd spoken in a different language altogether, which only led to more inner confusion. He asked what I knew of my father's travels, and I struggled to explain that I knew only what had been written and drawn in the journals that littered our home.

This man explained that suddenly the dolphins who had always been friend to sailors had begun to bring ships down into the deep unless they had upon them a cargo of lemon. Given that this fruit was incredibly rare, many had been lost, and few dared go out on the ocean. He eyed my horns and my tiny form, and asked me plainly what I knew of lemons. I tried to answer, but instead of words, retched, and a lemon fell from my mouth onto the deck.

In a moment that made little sense in dream or awake the man grasped the fruit and raised it high above his head proclaiming that our journey was safe.

I woke up for real at that point and sat thinking and trying to process this incredibly vivid dream. I told what I could remember to Osaka because it seemed really interesting at the time.