Dreams of Better Fodder

I’ve recently begun dreaming of the sea. Dreaming of the white, ice-laced, cloud-hung, chopping glacial waters of the Arctic, Baltic, Greenland and Norwegian seas.

I dream of traveling over them, traveling to them, drifting in them. I sail and scale the waters as if inside an Escher drawing: a möbius sea of block-like oceanic levels.

The cold is the most memorable: stabbing winds and stinging rain. The kind of cold that whips you conscious, rudely waking the part of your brain that sleeps warm and cozy, cushioned and hidden away, rarely used. Crystalline perception, tuned only to the cold.

Faint images of maps float inside my mind as I float around my oceans. I mentally track my movement with these maps, none of which hold any accuracy to the waking world. Once, I was traveling north to reach my seas and I watched the passage of desolate land on my false map. I remember being eager, yet rattlingly nervous to reach my northern waters.

Familiarity and strangeness permeate the dreams; it is as if I am returning to a familiar place after a long stay away. I know these seas and yet I don’t. Perhaps they’re in my own country and I’ve never visited them, or they are my family’s roots and I’m just discovering them. Perhaps I sailed through here long ago and am only just remembering.

I woke last night from a sea dream. I’d passed over thousands of desolate, remote acres covered in ice sheets. I had been standing in my boat balancing the pitch and roll of a storm. As I slowly came to consciousness I could feel the wind lifting the roots of my hair and blowing icy furls down my neck.