Lagoon

If you've been reading the other blog entries, you'll know that my dreams are rich and wonderful for me. This is last night's installment.

I am on a huge, white ship that is hurriedly being loaded for a migration to another shore. The ship is enormous and has several levels and multiple decks. It seems to be the size of a small city and is a composite of ocean liner and masted tall ship.

There are other ships loading though none quite as large as the one that I’m on. There is some sense of hurry to get to the destination. Once everyone is loaded, there is a race where several of the ships almost collide with ours. Our ship has some kind of enormous engine drive and picks up speed so fast that several people fall off of the masts, which have been divided into areas for different clans as is the decks and levels below. I remember one mast was for ‘pirates’, another for Irish bands, and one for friars with tonsures. It far outdistances the other ships and arrives at this beautiful cliff faced lagoon with turquoise waters.

The ship is at the destination so rapidly that the brakes have the same effect of dislodging riders. My group is called the Sea Maidens and we scurry off the ship and lay claim to a grotto with fresh water right on the mouth of the lagoon the ship lands in. The water is very clear, fresh and cool. We get hogsheads of ale and plop them into the grotto to keep cool in the water. They were stored in one of the wooden coolers of a tavern group on the ship we’re associated with.

We have to fight for our claim to the huge grotto and surrounding rooms when men come and put soap in the water of the grotto to make it foam up and challenge our right to be there. A ‘Grandmother’ is consulted as judge and determines that the soap is a temporary pollution and will clear up, which it does. She also grants our claim to the grotto and the rooms around it carved in rock because the Maidens have put our items in them, and because it’s our job to help off-load ships coming into the lagoon, defend the port, and to keep watch on the seas. It’s fitting and proper that we have the quarters and not the big warriors who challenged our claim.

Our leader determines that the big room just off the grotto would make a good sleeping chamber for the Maidens and has our bedding put in there. Candles are lit revealing a sparkling rose-colored room carved out of the living rock with a wooden door that leads to the side of a tavern – the same ones who stored our hogsheads of ale. There are chairs and tables put out and a musician is already playing. We are delighted to have a gathering place just outside our door with friends we know.

We discover other rooms and assign them their uses – one with a huge natural chimney will be our kitchen and dining quarters and small alcoves are used for storing food and supplies. It leads directly out to the beach just outside our door.

After our quarters are secured and our things put away, I go exploring with our leader. Everyone else has been busy as well. The land seems to have been divided much like our own into clans with their various affiliations and functions. There are several taverns with National themes like Ireland, England, Italy and France where the clans dress very alike and very colorfully.

We pass by scenes of celebration – one is a group of Warlocks and Wizards who are holding some kind of stage show complete with fog, blue demons with red eyes, and caped Wizards dancing in what I can only describe as very New York choreographed. Beautiful colors and lighting and a Warlock snaps lightning and colored orbs overhead throughout the production in a weird rendition of Warlock’s “River Dance.”

We walk outside and see that there are vast areas that are still untouched and uninhabited. It is beautiful and wild and seems to follow the one huge river that inlets right from the cove we landed on. Our leader is up ahead of me and comes to a place on the path that seems to be over grown. Her/our gown is a wench type outfit with long skirt, apron and blouse with a weskit laced up over it and our hair is tied up in a caul. Very practical in earth toned shades. But her outfit seems to waver as she does on whether to go on. She starts to look like a Hershey’s Kiss that has been elongated and curled. Her gown is now dark lapis blue with gold in wide stripes curling down to the belled bottom of her gown. I encourage her to push past the bushes and see what’s beyond and she morphs back into the plain gowns we usually wear.

As we clear the overgrowth, there are even more clans going busily about their day. Some are merchants selling various kinds of wares – jewelry, dry goods, foodstuffs, cheeses, spices and cloth. Some are making drums, shoeing horses and smithing. We decide to go back to our grotto and then will make a more thorough exploration later.

Back at the grotto, the other Maidens are checking charts and looking at timetables for ships, cooking, pulling small children away from the river, which is inhabited by these huge grouper-like fish. Men are pulling them out as fast as they can and carting them off to be salted. Further down the river from the inlet, there is a yellow-gold water grass that makes the surface of the water look as if you could walk across and it is here that children are trying to walk out on it, but we know that they will fall through and catch them setting up a guard to keep them out until they can be educated about the dangers. One of the large fish could swallow a good sized child whole.

The dream was very colorful, very vivid in detail down to the weave of my skirts, the textures of rock and sand and wood. It’s very exhilarating to be part of this effort to move all of my history to another land. Because that’s what I believe the various clans are – my history, bits of me. All of them represent some part of me from protector of children and the sea to standing up to the bullies to the pirates and gypsies I come across. Even the warlocks dancing with their demons are part of me.

Water always represents my spirituality in my dream symbology. I enjoyed traveling with the Sea Maidens and liked their energy. If travel was as easy and instantaneous to a destination, it would be wonderful. I’m not sure what the migration means but maybe I’m taking my act on the road.