It has been a long time since the proper mix of life, health, and uninterrupted sleep have combined in the “just perfect” ratios so that I could dream. It’s been an even longer time since the images have captured my attention and set me on edge. This morning was one of those “just perfect” moments and in the middle of the vision, I was jolted awake by a ringing phone, so I feel as though I have not made it back yet from the ethers and we are nearly 90 minutes beyond my waking.
I don’t like it when that happens.
For most of the 90 minutes I’ve been awake, I’ve been attempting to find an image to capture the significant wall of clouds I saw because they felt… important. This image above, a screen cap of one of the Mad Max movies and provided by wallpaperbetter.com (image linked to site) is the closest I could come to what had appeared to me, but this image is in the middle of what I remember of my dream. Let’s start at the beginning…
I was in a moving vehicle with the distinct impression we were heading west. It felt like a sizable, heavy thing, like a tank, and it seemed to have no windshield, so I could feel the wind touching me as we traveled. With agonizing definition, I felt every bump and jolt along the long, straight, seemingly deserted road we slowly ambled along, toward wherever we were heading. I knew I was in a foreign land because I recognized nothing I saw. Often, in my dreams, even if I go somewhere I’m not familiar with in my waking life, there will be a sense of familiarity. This was not the case this time around. I was somewhere I could not, and still cannot, identify and I had the strong sense we were on a quest. We were searching for someone… or maybe many someones, or at least I was.
I had a map in my hand. It was large when fully straightened out, able to cover the top of a table that magically appeared in the moments we were not driving. The paper was worn and aged, yellowing with time, the ink seemingly embedded in the paper, was browned and spreading. There was no writing on the map, but there were eight symbols – placed in two rows of four -that I understood at the time and knew them to be the legend indicating the specific sites I was looking for. I got the sense that my quest was different than the quests of the other two people with me. In the dream, I didn’t know the man who was driving, but I felt safe and comfortable with him. I did know the young woman who sat to the right of me – I was in the middle. She and I were friends, but all three of us were on different quests and they could not know mine.
As I studied the map, my vision narrowed in on several of the markings, as though they were mine to recognize:
When I studied each symbol, I knew what they meant. Of the eight that were there, these are the five that I’ve retained. Each of these marked a site where I needed to be to find the people I was looking for. The first one, the double-lined cross, was a symbol that sparked awareness in all of us, so that is where we were heading. Studying the map, I could see the area aligned with this symbol, even though there was no symbol in that area.
It was night, but the atmosphere to the left of us was glowing an eerie orange, as we drove along the forgotten highway. The light was just bright enough to indicate there was a vast open space there with nothing but a long-abandoned factory or refinery. The skeletal, linear, sharp lines of the buildings and stacks stood silhouetted in the glow that illuminated it only enough to show there was something there, but not enough to be able to identify exactly what it was. I kept looking around the driver to see out his side window, trying to discern what was causing the anxiety-inducing glow. The young woman beside me kept whispering in my ear, but I no longer recall what she was saying. She was afraid of the driver, I know that. He didn’t bother me; I got no weird energy from him. In fact, I felt as though I could “take him” if it came to that; my young friend knew no such thing for herself.
Suddenly, there was a heave beneath us, as if the entire planet inhaled. To our left, there was a resounding thud. Staring out the driver’s window, I watched as the earth beneath the factory rose in a bubble, as if something had exploded deep within the ground and the reverberations were moving up to the surface. The factory rose on the growing bubble of land and then, in a cacophony of light and sound, everything there erupted. The driver pressed the gas pedal to the floor and we lurched forward as the eruption to the left of us sent voluminous clouds climbing upward and outward, stretching from horizon to horizon. As far as I could see, the clouds created a wall all around us and straight in front of us.
“We’re going to drive into that?!” I called out, frantically searching the driver’s face for a sign that he was not, indeed, losing his mind and driving us into the cloud and dust storm in front of us.
“There is nowhere for us to go, but through,” he said, determinedly, pressing even harder to the gas.
My mind raced. I didn’t have a gas mask. None of us did. I didn’t know if the clouds were toxic, how thick the wall would be, or if we’d be able to breathe while in the midst of the wall we were approaching. The sound of earth slamming, things exploding, and the rumble of the vehicle was deafening.
Seconds later, we plunged into the clouds. Instantly, there was silence as we became ensconced in grey, swirling diaphanous mists. The silence, though, was not comforting. It was thick with sounds that were being swallowed by miles of atmosphere and it felt heavy against my skull, as though I was being compressed. The clouds caressed my face, cool, damp, soft. Tentatively, I breathed in and felt the acrid atmosphere singe my innards. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the mix, but it was just enough that we might make it out alive, if the wall wasn’t too thick.
My mouth felt dry. Everything inside me felt dry. But, droplets of moisture clung to every external surface. I glanced down at my arms, mystified by how it looked like I had diamond dust clinging to my arm hair. My skin was damp, but my nose was burning and my lungs were burning and every breath felt as though I was breathing acidic fire.
The journey through the wall was excruciating and I was beginning to lose hope that we were going to make it though alive. I had become solely focused on my own experience, ignoring my companions as I strove to remain alive. Remembering I wasn’t alone, I stretched my awareness outward to sense their bodies because I couldn’t really see them. The mists had swallowed all of us as we drove forward, wiping away the road, the vehicle, and anything else that was more than two feet away from me. The driver seemed to not be affected at all, I noticed as I glanced in his direction. Flashes in the distance illuminated the clouds beyond him, casting him into relief for a long enough of a moment that I could see he was alert, staring ahead, and focused.
He glanced toward me, sensing me searching for him, I supposed. He yelled, his voice swallowed by the clouds so it came to me as a sigh, “I’m good.”
Nodding, even though I knew he couldn’t see me, I glanced toward my friend. She was in the shadows as there was no source of light to the right of us. I couldn’t sense her at all. Reaching toward where I believed her hand would be, I encountered her thigh. Running my hand along the side of her leg, to her hip and upward, I found her arm. Blindly, I felt along the length of her arm until I found her wrist. Focusing intently, I waited for her pulse. It was slow and dim, but still there. My friend made no sound, but that limp pulse was enough to restore my hope.
Moments later, we burst out of the clouds. On the other side of the wall, the fresh air was a relief and the true silence was liberating. In unison, the three of us gasped, hungrily sucking in truly breathable air for the first time in about ten minutes – or ten years. The time inside the wall had warped my sense of reality and my sense of locality. It was as though we had gone through a warp that turned us upside-down and inside-out. I was no longer certain we were heading west; in fact, I wasn’t even certain we were in the same dimension.
The land before the wall had been dark, barren, deserted. On the other side of the wall, it was lush, verdant, full of blues and greens that seemed to glow in the light of the full moon that was impossibly bright. There had been no moon in the desert, before the eruption, before the clouds. It had just been darkness with an eerie orange glow.
In the distance, there were gentle mountains. Spotting the building atop one of the hills, the driver veered in that direction. The building had an energy emanating from it that felt like the double-line cross and it seemed to be glowing ethereally. It felt like where we needed to be immediately. We drove through the mountains that were strangely thick with vegetation and moisture. Somewhere along the way, it became dawn and then day as we approached the glowing building.
I could feel my heart being tugged upon as we drove up the winding approach that was elegantly ornate and cultured. The driver stopped the vehicle and turned off the ignition and…
the phone rang…
