Early this morning, I had one of those dreams that’s totally straight over the plate in terms of having a nicely structured plot, and a pretty easy to discern set of symbols and meaning. The whole thing centered around three people: me, my friend John and his friend from home DJ. The dream originally begins that John and I are going to NYC to see DJ, but also to pick up a car for John, because DJ is, in the dream, running some kind of garage that takes cars and supes them up for a variety of high end but shady clientele. Anyway, John had gotten into a car accident or sold his old car or something, and DJ was gonna fix him up a new one. It turned out that John’s uncle or grandfather or somebody had this cool old convertible which had been brought down by DJ for this purpose. The background story was that his grandma or somebody in the family really wanted to be able to have a picture of John standing next to this car, just like this old picture from way back when of the original owner standing next to it.
But anyway, this is all just background in the dream and not at all the focus of it. Eventually DJ unveils this car to us and it’s totally cool as hell. Then we all get into like sort of deep conversation about our lives and stuff. And DJ is talking about he’s tired of living “the fast life” in NYC and is trying to change things around. We then go way the hell uptown with him, much farther than I’ve ever gone in real life, to his apartment. We drop off his things and then hit the streets. There is an old homeless man who’s crazy and more than a little scary, but DJ helps him out with some food or money or something. For some reason, John has a broom and is trying lazily to sweep the streets. This is one of the only details in the dream I don’t totally get. Anyway, and we’re all walking along and I start singing this joke song about sweeping the street.
Then we come up on the entrance to a park. Just outside the entrance are sitting two or three girls around our age, and an old woman. I say hello and ask them what’s inside the park. They tell me there’s some kind of old abandoned highschool for “derelicts” inside there and that it’s very dangerous. The old woman indicates that if we stay on the left-hand path while we’re in there, we will get through to the other side safely. But that if we veer off on the right hand path “toward the sculptures” then we may get into trouble.
We walk in and immediately see the branching path. I start to go left, but DJ wants to go right, and John follows. So I grudgingly join them. In this area, we find different weird satanic circles of some sort built crudely into the ground. There are various stones and hewn log sculpture things, all of which seem to warn us not to go down this path. But of course we proceed anyway. Immediately, the ground further down the path becomes extremely muddy. I once again try to get them to turn back and take the other path, if not for our own safety, than just to prevent getting totally muddy. But my protests are to no avail and DJ plunges onward. Soon, we’re up to our hips in mud, and then our chests and eventually, we’re basically just swimming through disgusting muddy swamp water. I start to freak out a bit, cause I can’t really swim, and I’m grabbing at various branches and things, trying to get out, or just stop, but I can’t.
Just at that moment, the homeless guy who DJ helped on the street appears, moving past us in the water. He doesn’t say anything to us, and appears to be completely naked, so that clothes and shoes won’t encumber him in the swamp. The secret method of locomotion he has devised for getting through this swampy environment involves using a walking stick he had as a sort of paddle out in front of him. We realize that the reason the man seemed crazy out on the streets is only because he was out of his element. For some reason, this swamp is his natural environment. As he passes on, each of us finds a long stick of our own to use in a similar fashion to how we saw him getting around.
Eventually, the muddy swampy river opens up to a stagnant lake on one side and on the side we’re closer to, we get right up to the base of a muddy crumbling cliff. At the top of it is some kind of old stone building. It looks like its been there for centuries and major sections of it have broken off, and presumably fallen into the swamp we’re now swimming in. There are several small outlying land masses in the water, with other ruined old structures on them. We stay where we are for a few minutes, surveying the ruins. Suddenly, as if in a flash of insight, DJ says that he understands what happened here. He claims that the English army used to use this as a fort, but that the worst enemy they ever fought here was the encroach of the swamp. He says that they struggled againt it for years, sandbagging and attempting various techniques to keep three tiny islands and a fortress from being sucked into the swamp and lost for good. He says they should have realized this was a fruitless endeavor, and that these islands and fort weren’t worth it, and that they could have been living someplace else in the lap of luxury and tranquility. Instead they fought on for something that wasn’t even worth it, and lost. And he announced that in some sense he’d been doing this too, he realized, vowing to stopped.
At this pivotal moment, a light seems to break over us, and we realize there is a modern house on another shore. We swim towards it and climb out at the banks. We have to placate two angry guard dogs, one black and one brown outside the house. The owners of the house turn out to be a nice black couple, and the man promises to help us. We’re standing there soaked and muddy, and much of our clothes have been lost or ruined. We go inside to clean up and make some phone calls to loved ones, but also to cancel credit cards and things, because our wallets have been lost to the swamp. For some reason, this seems like a really big problem to me, and I’m very worried about it. Then through some great force of will, I get myself to remember that, no, my wallet wasn’t washed away. I have a chain wallet, it’s still attached to me, and everything is still intact. I pull it out, and sure enough, it’s all there. I’m very happy. Then I remind John that I got him one of these wallets as well, and sure enough, he pulls it out. For some reason, this is a major victory, coupled with the knowledge we’d gained in the swamp that sometimes we struggle to retain things because we think they identify us, when really they didn’t belong to us at all. They belonged to the swamp all along, and where we should have spent our time was further inland in luxury and prosperity.
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