Dream

Every once in a while I will have a dream that seems to span an entire night. I can wake up several times during the course of it, but upon falling back asleep I will pick up where I left off in the dream and continue. Last night was one of these dreams:

I was on a public street, on a very steep hill, walking between some gray, poorly-constructed buildings, and there was a man who was paying far too much attention to me. I kept trying to get him to leave me alone, but he wouldn't. He kept asking me to go with him, and I knew he wanted to put his hands all over me, torture me for his own pleasure. He was of medium height, balding, and wore round glasses.

Finally I ran from him, and ended up wandering into a sort of cooking demonstration put on by my coworker. He took a huge cast iron pan/wok (it was rounded on the bottom) from underneath the stove, and pressed a hidden button somewhere that made the bottom of the pan begin to glow blue. It floated up onto the stove of its own accord, rocked for a bit, and then stabilized, hovering about 2" above the surface of the stove.

A diverse crowd of people was sitting on some short bleachers behind him, oohing and aahing at his levitating pan. He added some shredded pork and a bit of sauce, then decided to take his work back with him to a different cooking station behind the crowd. He walked over to his new spot, and his pan began to follow him, but it didn't go around the crowd. It tried to go right over them. I saw a young girl cringing as the hot pan came nearer and nearer to her face, just barely avoiding it.

I jumped up and wrapped a towel around the pan's handle, then gave it a good wrench to pull it off its planned track, away from the girl's face, and dragged it back to where my coworker was now standing, trying to get it there before the heat from the pan's handle burned me through the towel. I put it on the second stove back where he was, noticed he'd put some potatoes on to cook as well, and helped myself to a piece of pork, commenting that it was odd he was preparing it, given his religion. He shrugged and told me that a friend had asked him to make it, and that it was fine so long as he didn't eat any himself.

Around this time, I began to remember the threatening man from earlier in my dream. I saw him in the crowd then, making his way toward me. I ran to the back of the room and through a doorway, emerging in the middle of an orchestra rehearsal. I didn't want to interrupt, so I quietly made my way to the back, and wedged myself into this little cutout space I found inside a wall, pulling the carpet-lined concealing door closed after me. People had given me some odd looks when they saw me doing this, but those did not last long.

Not two minutes after I pulled the concealing door shut, I heard gunshots being fired and people in the orchestra room panicking. I could hear the sounds of them stampeding to get out, bangs and crashes from all the instruments hitting the floor. I could see out through a tiny crack in the door, and I watched as my pursuer slowly stalked through the now-empty room, looking for me.

He missed my concealed hiding place and left the room. I was overcome by an immediate desire to get out of there before he returned, and threw open my door, making a beeline for the stairs. I ran down multiple flights as quickly as I could, sometimes jumping and sometimes using the handrails to slide down even faster.

When I finally reached the bottom, I burst through the exit door and found myself in a field of tall, waving yellow and green grasses with a river running through it. The sun was shining, and I was now wearing my one-piece black swimming suit instead of the street clothes I'd been in previously, so I dove into the water. I began swimming at a normal pace, front crawling my way along with the flow of the river. Soon I came to a house that I recognized as being owned by a friend of mine.

I climbed out of the water and banged on her door. She opened it and gasped at seeing me there, then ran to get me a towel that I wrapped around myself. We spoke for a few minutes, and I filled her in on what was happening with my pursuer. She looked worried and told me that if I'd somehow forgotten, I could always swim faster. I asked her what she meant, and she vaguely alluded to some sort of half-swimming, half-teleportation. I was skeptical, but agreed to give this a try.

Just then, we heard a banging at her front door (I'd arrived at the back, and we were sitting on her porch at the rear of the house). She hissed at me to run while she delayed him, and I dove off the side of the deck back into the safety of the river.

I can't remember how I managed to use the skill she'd mentioned, if I just thought it to myself or what, but now it seemed I could almost fly when in the water. The banks whizzed by in a dizzying blur, and I passed rapidly along the river toward first a lake into which it flowed and then out to the sea.

For some reason, I decided the saltwater wasn't safe, and retreated back upstream to the lake, then picked a new river branch to zoom down. I swam and swam until I came to a place where trees and rocks were becoming abundant along the banks. Here I suddenly became aware of someone else who had entered the water with me. She was beside me, and I had at one point known her as a friend, but now her eyes were wild, and I knew she could no longer be trusted.

I was certain she was going to try to detain me until my pursuer could overtake us, and I warned her to keep her distance when she tried to approach me more closely as we drifted with the current. She eyed me warily, and then seemed to decide that informing on my whereabouts would have to suffice, rather than capturing me herself. She retreated to the bank, and I drove myself forward through the water away from her as quickly as I possibly could.

More land sped by as I flew through the water, much faster than any human could ever normally dream of doing. The river made an abrupt left turn at a place where the banks were made of black, rich soil and greenery abounded. Trees of immense height towered above me, their huge trunks green and rubbery-looking.

The day was getting on in hours, and I knew I'd have to find a place to sleep soon, hopefully where my stalker couldn't find me. I hauled myself out of the water and began climbing up the steep bank, but soon realized that the route I'd chosen was too sharply inclined for me to navigate. I doubled back and found a way up onto a higher section of bank, the ground crisscrossed with enormous tree roots.

The thing about dreams is that, no matter how fast and clever you are or how slow the thing chasing you seems to move, it can always catch up to you when it wants to. My would-be assailant in this dream was no exception.

I had only just settled into a comfortable position to rest and watch the river for signs of pursuit when he found me. He appeared beneath my hiding place on the bank and gave me a nasty smile. I had a feeling he didn't want to approach the trees any closer, as he was standing on a rock at the edge of the river and showed no desire to climb up to grab me, which seemed strange when you considered all the effort he'd already invested in trying to capture me.

The wind blew his baseball cap up to me, and it landed on the soil in between two tree roots. I kicked it off my ledge and back to him, since I didn't want anything of his up there with me. It had brushed against the tree roots as I removed it from my resting place, and when he put it back on his head, he immediately started cursing and scratching his face, ripped the hat off and threw it on the ground.

I wanted to laugh at the thought of my pursuer, who had spent so much time and energy trying to find me, being foiled by an apparently violent allergy to tree roots. He glared up at me and told me he'd be back very soon. Then he took off downstream, presumably to find outerwear that would protect against the trees and allow him to climb up to seize me.

I of course had no intention of allowing this, so as soon as he was out of sight I clambered off my bank down the other side and slid right onto the deck of someone's luxurious house. Built directly over the river, it had a wonderful view of the rapids and different waterways created by the many large rocks that now crowded the river's bed.

I could hear rapid footsteps behind me and knew he was coming. I jumped off the deck into the nearest section of river, hoping the water would be deep enough for me to use my water flying ability. It was, but only just, and only for a very short time. In approximately a quarter mile I was brought up short with a gasp when I came to the edge of a cliff, which I assumed was just another waterfall, and saw the river had disappeared. No, not disappeared, gone underground.

What are you to do, when the alternative to being slowly violated and tortured to death is possibly (probably) drowning underground as you are dragged along in the blackness and trusting to the water to eventually provide you with air again?

I considered all this and weighed it in my mind as I stared at the dark hole where the water was making its own escape. I could still hear sounds of pursuit, and I knew I had only a few minutes to make up my mind. Which death would it be? With only a few seconds left to decide, I swore I'd never give in and give my stalker the satisfaction of taking me alive. If he ever got his hands on me, I'd already be dead.

I used the last of my remaining strength to rip away several of the rocks covering the entrance to the river's underground course, just enough so I could slide myself down into the rushing dark. My last thought before I slid underground was to take as big a breath as I possibly could. Then I let go and allowed the water to sweep me into the black.