Dream

In the dream I am walking in a blue-grey mountain valley at the edge of a long smooth lake.

There’s a black hole in the sky. I realize it's is an enormous military helicopter. I watch it slowly land.

Then I see a man standing on the surface of the lake and I wonder if I too can stand on the surface of the lake and so then I am walking on the surface of the lake towards him. He's not connected with the military helicopter, but he is a pilot.

I’m walking towards the man, who is not Jesus-like at all. He is more like a retired German, the kind of pleasant gray-bearded amateur pilot you might find in any small town in British Columbia.

At first, I'm able to stand on the surface of the water, but as I move towards him I am sinking deeper in the water, until eventually I am swimming. We are talking as I approach him.

"Oh, you’re standing on something," I say. It's the bone-white propeller of a submerged aircraft, glowing under the water like the rib of a whale. Perhaps earlier I was also standing on a similar sunken plane.

As I’m swimming I can see other forms in the water. I think they are other planes, but I am also worried that they might be the shapes of whales or sharks. I want to get out of the water. I’m anxious.

And so then I am getting out of the water at the edge of the lake and the man is getting out too and he is still talking to me. His real plane stands at the edge of the water and he is talking as though he is going to fly me home. He says, "don’t worry that there are so many of you. That will be all right." I'm confused because I came here alone, but then I see a group of young women come walking towards us. They stand out because they are all golden and bright warm colours, while this place is kind of quiet and blue-gray. He thinks we're friends. I think he'll have to take us in several shifts.

Beyond his plane there's a small terminal and I think there's a road, the highway, above us. Between us and the terminal, looking out over the water, there is a kind of outdoor shelter, a picnic table with benches under a wooden roof with open sides. Two other people are sitting there. I think a man and a woman. Friends or colleagues of this man, the pilot. I look around. We are in a tiny town, a few buildings clustered along the highway and crowding up the foothills. “Beautiful place to live,” I say.

We seem to be in a small semi-industrial area. The pilot says something like he's showing me how small the town is is and he shouts up to someone across the road, a few hundred feet away at a kind of Tudor-style building, small, some kind of industrial service or repair place. "Hello, customer," he says and waves, and the person, a woman, smiling, waves back. There's a red sign behind her.

All of these people are late-middle-aged adults, warm and relaxed. In the dream I'm quite a bit younger than they are, though in real life they might be maybe fifteen or twenty years older than I am now, in their early 60s, robust and happy and settled where they are. The woman at the table is also talking. They are all people who do concrete things for a living, who work in the material world, and this is part of their settled happiness, their confidence that their lives are good.

Another man and a woman come walking from the other direction, back the way I have come. The people at the table greet them, and they are also friends. They are walking up towards us at this picnic table in the shelter.

As I write this down it seems like a dream about death.

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