How did I end up here?

I went in search for a place I used to dream about.

What am I waiting for?

The tide to recede. The ocean to calm.

Dream as in sleeping or dream as in aspiration?

Sleeping dream. Funny that my aspirations couldn’t get me going.

Why am I searching for this dream, or rather, what do I expect?

Not sure, hence these semi-rhetorical questions. But something profound, of significance.

Was it just a one off dream?

On the contrary. It was the only recurring dream I ever had.

Did I have it often?

No. Yearly. Maybe not even that.

How old was I when I first had it?

Nine. —ish?

Do I still have these dreams?

No, therefore my search.

When did they stop?

As a teenager.

Did that upset me? Have I been pining for these dreams since then?

Not at all. They were never regular enough to notice when they stopped for good. And the worries of a teenager always preoccupied me more.

Did I forget about this dream?

No. I always remembered. I always kinda missed them. They were different than my other dreams. As if.

As if what?

As if it were more then just a dream.

So what the fuck was this dream that’s got me in such fervor?

It was a world without form, before God spoke. Shades of yellowish grey distinguished the cloudless and sunless sky from an indistinct surface, not land, but ever shifting waves of honeycomb-like dunes. A barren world except for my two older brothers and me.

What were we doing?

Separated across the large expanse of the shifting landscape, we called back and forth but the sounds were in slow motion as if from some aural strobe light effect. The whole environment vibrated on an odd frequency, humming through the air and shimmering the light. The surface ebbed and flowed erratically, drastically so. Then instead of calling to each other, we were throwing something that managed to be a football, a Frisbee, and a boomerang all at once and thus never quite anything. It too had a strobe light effect going, but not flashes of light then darkness. Just flashes of focus and non-focus, just as the gap between my brothers and I seemed near then unbreachably far. But my brothers stayed together. It was I who was cast far away to the even more remote barren isolated tracts of this alien world.

Dreams tend to settle down, if still remaining bizarre, as one gets comfortable in the environment, learns the rule of the world. Did this one?

No. It remained disorientating. The laws of physics were confoundingly absent, again as if this were a world pre-creation. Gravity seemed to exist, but not firmly so. But the world wasn’t quite ruled by dream logic, either. It was too barren for any sense to grasp onto, nothing there for even dream logic to work with.

How did I feel upon waking up?

I always awoke unsettled and enthralled. Lots of dreams stick, but none more so than this dream. It was so vibrant, forceful, visceral. Other dreams I always knew were just random brain nonsense; this dream felt significant, as if there were great meaning behind it. It was as if I had traveled to another place while asleep, for real. Mysteriously transported to another realm or dimension. But I never could find the meaning behind this dream or the purpose for it all, which I always felt was there.

What does Freud say about this?

I never checked. Nor Jung. I figured it was special to me.

Why now?

I didn’t quite grasp it back then. Childhood concerns drove it away.

But exactly why now?

It started with a chance encounter with Honeycomb. That children’s cereal. I no longer eat children’s cereal. I don’t have it around. I never see it. I don’t have cause to. But I was visiting my brother. And he does have it because he has kids and indulges them with overly sweetened cereal. I was hungry late night and there it was, so I poured a bowl and then the milk and then I saw it. Each bit of honeycomb cereal, even if only kind of looking like honeycomb, floating on the pond of milk, undulating, reminded me of my funky ass trippy dream from way back in my own childhood.

What did I do then?

I thought I would have that dream again. That concentrating so deeply on my memory of it would trigger it. But night after night came and went with the usual boring dreams of odd anxieties and nonsensical sex fantasies.

So I went searching for it?

Not then. I figured, I still figure, that I needed to naturally go back there. Drawn back to this place by something outside of me, or deeply within me, something that I don’t have control over, can’t have control over, don’t want to have control over; something that wants me to find out what it means.

So why didn’t I let it?

I tried, damnit. But nothing came.

And I then moved on to something else in life?

A normal person would. But I thought, let’s find this place for real. It’ll be fun. I had the time and the means.

So, again, why now?

Fuck, I’ll know when I find it.

What did I try?

Drugs. Wandering out into sparse high deserts. Spelunking. Different drugs. Canadian glaciers. Sensory deprivation chambers. More drugs.

How’d they work out?

They didn’t. But they were fun.

But that wasn’t nearly enough?

No. I became stupid obsessed with this dream. I needed to find it.

Why the urgency?

After all these years, and only half a dozen dreams, though still feeling so vivid, subdued in appearance, but so unforgettably vivid, still it fades. Though even as a child, when I still had the dreams, I couldn’t quite grasp the vivid strangeness.

Yes, but why the urgency now?

The sense of a meaning still waiting, still needing, to be figured out grows stronger with age. I need get there to find out why. I have to be submerged into once more, perhaps more so than ever before to know why I need to be there.

Is that what I want?

Yes. To be submerged, engulfed, enveloped, saturated.

And that is how I ended up here?

And that’s how ended up here in these dunes. Not a goddamn other person around. Fucking sand all over me. Like a big dumbass. And it still isn’t the right place. I’m still in the regular world.

So this is just to escape reality?

It seems that shallow. Just bored with how things are and want to find this strange world to explore around it. Just a weird strange experience that had recurred and was found interesting and it would be a nice change of pace to break up the monotony of the real world to experience again and any greater significance I put on it, speculation that it’s real, is just pure make-believe, just grafting meaning and explanations onto the unknown.

But?

But I could be wrong. And if I am.

And if?

Then I would be a fool to pass it up.

So what will I do when the ocean calms?

Easily slip out into the gently swelling waves far off shore, and float there, letting the sea push and pull me around in a foreign, or at least atypical, environment

Why a calm sea?

Crashing waves are too violent. My dream was chaotic, but not dangerous. Though I think even the ocean is too rhythmic. My dream never had a rhythm.

So, again, what do I hope to achieve, what do I expect, if I do find that place out in the ocean?

A jolt of recognition, then understanding, perhaps leading to enlightenment?

What do I remember most about the dream?

The nearly unbearable emptiness.

And if the sea still isn’t the right place?

Indeed, where else could I go but further out into the sea?