Dream Last Night

There was a large party of us that landed on a shore. The settlement was wiped out. We were exploring the ruin. I knew somehow that we needed torches, so I told anyone who would listen to make them. The problem was that we didn’t have but a little gasoline and some branches and somehow it felt as though we didn’t have much time. I could sense evil. Could sense death approaching. And then even though some of the howls were far off, I knew there were wolves in among us. I was trying to light a torch. As it so often is in my dreams, I run more slowly than in real life, drop things, make more mistakes, cannot turn when I need to turn. Whatever is required to defend myself, I cannot make my body respond adequately. It feels like amputation. I couldn’t get my torch adequately lit. You could feel the wolves… in the perimeter, so to speak… upon you but not upon you. Close enough that proximity was a challenge. They were unafraid and intent and confident. And I felt it behind me, turned and saw the yellow eyes. I had to beat the wolves off with branches. The whole party was moving, unwisely, I felt, farther in, seeking more understanding of what had happened, perhaps survivors, refuge from the wolves. There were more of them than us, and they were wild intelligent things bent on destroying us. Not ordinary wolves. Wolves in a nightmare. Somehow we lost the boats. I can’t remember, but I think someone in the party destroyed them. In these kinds of dreams, others around me act irrationally and I can’t prevent them. I can’t speak soon enough or clearly enough against the lot of them. So we were stranded and moving inward. I was attacked again, I think. I remember fighting something along a trail in the woods. I remember death, but I seem to have blocked it out. Bodies destroyed. There’s a leap, then. I don’t know why. I think perhaps I woke up and then fell asleep into the same dream. That happens a lot. Sometimes many times in a row. I was building a boat. Large for a boat, small for a ship. They said such a boat couldn’t be built, but I kept on building it. And they watched from the bank as it coursed through the waters. They said I shouldn’t take it back because others would want to destroy me for it, punish me for it. That I shouldn’t let it be seen. But I did take it back. I sailed away from that shore. There’s another jump, and I’ve landed. We’re in Korea. There are several of us on the boat, I think. My wife is there. And indeed, we’re drawing some attention, but it’s indirect attention for the most part. Concealed. I remember we spent a little time there, and we were with people priests and deacons, monks too, I think. And then we had to leave. I think we might have been on the shorline port again, once, and saw them coming for us. The Korean police were after us. The Church has a secret way out of that country. A ‘railroad’, of sorts. It was elaborate. Changes of cars. Parking at one place and taking passages through buildings, connecting to residences, back into dark stairs, abandoned areas, and ultimately out into the air again. We had to go blind down stairs or into abandoned open buildings at times. All of them connecting somehow. They kept urging us that we had to hurry, that there was no time, that we had to be absolutely quiet, lest we be heard through the walls. I saw my wife take a wrong turn in the dark. I wanted to tell her but we had to be quiet. I thought she would back up when she saw us going the other way. She didn’t. I was being ushered down stairs. I couldn’t let her be lost. I turned to go back for her, and I was alone. No one behind me. I went back, but I couldn’t find her. There were too many ways to turn where she entered. I called very lightly to her and to the others. No answer. I had to find her. I decided to get help and tried to hurry down the way I thought those in front of me had gone. Tried to catch up to them, to take them back. But no one was there, and I came out on a large hill of rocks on a beautiful beach, a resort, crowded with Westerners speaking French or English, maybe some Russians too. It wasn’t a large hill, so I searched it, but found no one. I was really worried now. Desperate. I went back, realizing how hard it would be to retrace my steps in the dark through that maze of connecting passages, rooms, stairs, and buildings.But I would try. And this time, I would call out loudly for her. I remember stepping into the dark. To my right the wood was a few boards with a lot of space between them. Rotten, a little, I think. Not solid wall. I was going to try to see within that chamber, and then I woke up. I felt the intense need to return to the dream and rescue my wife, at least, even if the police got us. But I couldn’t fall asleep again. And I had, at last, to remind myself that it was a dream, that she was safe, and that I didn’t have to return to it. It strikes me that this dream may be another form of the trapmare that I have, sometimes. The dream from which one can’t escape. And if one wakes, one is plunged into it again in a few minutes by irresistible sleep. Dreams where the irrational prevails.