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Dream 13: Frozen I woke up from a dream today. Instead of simply sinking back into sleep (which was VERY tempting), I struggled up half an hour before I had to and wrote it down. What you see is almost exactly what I wrote, half asleep in the morning minus the various typos. The title is one that I wrote down in the morning as it was the first thing on my mind. Reading it now, I'm not exactly sure that it fits but I'll leave it as is. We arrive at this place by boat, perhaps a rowboat. I'm in the boat along with this man that I know to be special in some way and a few others, possibly just the rowers. The place where we arrive is a city floating on the waters of the ocean. It may or may not have been near the shore or other stable landmass. The village looks sort of like it's made up of docks like Kilika Village in Final Fantasy X except that it was much prettier. I was reminded of the descriptions of the Elven village in book 4 of Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, a city made of coral with tall, delicate spires and such. Animals are brought to this pavilion type place at the edge of the village area and a spell is cast upon them that me and the man are allowed to watch and they are magically frozen in a crystal like substance that reminds me of ice. We leave that village or leave that portion of the village to hed to another village or area that looks almost the same as the first and the same ritual is carried out. Somewhere along the line, a girl joins us. She is a native to the floating village and she looks like she's keeping a secret. Her face is closed to us and she seems to hate the special man that we travel with, although to me, he seems very innocent. We travel to a number of villages and the same routine happens. The people around us celebrate slightly with lots of good food and some dancing maybe? And then at the end, we're taken to another pavilion and allowed to watch another set of animals being frozen in crystal. We arrive at the last village about an hour from sunset. I remember because the first thing anyone says to us there is "I hope that you'll still be here to watch the sun touch the waters." It is here that the tradition breaks a bit. There is no celebration as with the previous areas and the girl travelling with us flashes us her secretive smile and leaves us alone for a time. Everyone in the village is gathered along the path where we walk that leads to the final pavilion and they are all singing. They aren't really singing a song but going more along the lines of a hymn...or a dirge. (Singing a requiem maybe? That word's been on my mind a lot lately...) (Fragment): Are they all angels? Or wearing a pair of angel wings on their backs? Whatever the reason, me and theman are made to walk amongst them so that "we are brushing the wings and not the persons." (that quoted fragment is something I remember thinking to myself in the dream as I tried to describe it to myself.) We arrive near the end of the path, where the final pavilion is and it is sunset. The sun is sinking behind the waves and turning the water into this golden color of fire. The water burns. Everyone in the village starts chanting again and the leader person (chief?) comes to the front and conveys the reasons for all the rituals. I say "conveys" because I have no clear sense of him talking but I'm suddenly struck with the knowledge of what all this is about. The man I've been travelling with, although he seems innocent and I know that he's been suddenly reborn (yes, suddenly reborn as a full grown man, innocent and such), apparently, in his previous life, he had come to this village and cast spells, freezing some of the populace in the same crystaline substance that we had just seen them do to the animals. (Sacrifices?) It is hoped that by freezing the man the same way, the victims will be freed from their icy prisons. The man begins to run with a horror-struck look on his face and I follow after him. We run amidst the villagers who are all chanting with evil smiles on their faces. The girl is following but her brow is furrowed as the man conveys to me and her, his protests that he doesn't know what the chief is talking about; that he is innocent. His running brings him to the final pavilion where the spell from the villagers is unleashed. As the spell hits him, he grasps my hand and the hand of the girl. Feeling pity, I switch mine around so that I'm clasping his hand between both of mine instead. I do this partly out of pity and partly because if he's going to be frozen in crystal, I've no wish to trap my hand in his for all time. He looks at me beseechingly, slowly shaking his head as the ice climbs up his body and mouths the words, "I didn't know." All I can do is nod, pat the hand that I hold and tell him, "I know." The girl is struggling to free herself but she pauses when the man looks at her and just gives her a heartbreakingly sad smile. Were they connected in some way? Family perhaps that I didn't pick up on or remember from the dream? It's possible. It seems that she sees something in his gaze that plants doubt in her as she freezes for a moment herself, perhaps finally doubting the doctrine of the village elder guy and believing that the MAN might be right instead of him. But it's too late as a look of horror comes over her and the man finally completes his transformation. She gyrates wildly, trying to get free and eventually, she does so. She is able to because for some reason, I know that the spell and it's subjects are slightly malleable in the first stages of freezing, so that the caster of the spell can pose the victims any way he wants to. Among the cheering crowd of the village, two sallow, evil looking youngsters are brought forward and I somehow know that it is they who are freed from the man's icy curse and I think to myself that the man was a far more worthy living creature than these two little evil urchins. As they celebrate, I make my way along the dock area to see many boats arriving, presumably to celebrate the capture of the magician man. The girl follows me, sort of broken as she hears from the village elder that the man will make a marvelous addition to the collection and that some foreign folks from far away have brought a pair of bears to add to the collection as well. As she hears that, I can see on a boat, two bears in a cage being transferred onto the docks. I keep walking, suspicious and see another boat with two geese sleeping in little geese hammocks with their heads tucked under their wings. I look to the right between two large boats witht he girl next to me and see that they are lowering their rowboats filled with poeple and are about to head off to...wherever. Perhaps to see the village man's 'collection'? One boat is filled with a bunch of poeple that look sort of like a cross between the students from Harry Potter's Hogwarts school and some swarthy pirates, if you can dig it. Imagine like a bunch of 5'5-6 foot tall men, some scarred, all of them looking vicious but all wearing those black magician robes, sitting in a small rowboat, all ready to go. I am thinking about sneaking onto that boat and joining their midst (somehow, the problem of a disguise never occurred to me) when the girl darts forward with a sort of dead expression on her face and hops onto the boat, making her way to an empty seat and grabs up an oar. Apparently the problem of disguise never occurs to her either. They don't even give her a second glance and begin to row away and I curse my missed chance. I run along the docks in the direction that all the boats are heading in and see that the poeple from the final pavilioin are in a boat of their own, heading towards the newcomers' boats. There is a minor crash of sorts as the pirate magician boat bangs into the back of the pavilion folks boat. There is outrage. The dream ends before I get to see where they're going. And that's all she wrote. That one left me feeling fairly unsettled for some reason...though I suppose the loss of sleep may have had something to do with it. |