I
had another strange dream. Very different from the previous ones, this was not
a nightmare, quite the contrary. The diver from the
photos appeared to me. He looked nothing like in the photos, but it was the
same man. He was the poet who had written the poems as well. In the dream he
floated in the air above me in the bedroom as if we were underwater. He was
wearing a strange, heavy diving suit, almost like a spacesuit, and he was
shining with a bright light. He told me things that in the dream made perfect
sense, but now not so much. I’ve made a habit of keeping a notebook and a pen
by my nightstand, so that I can write down my dreams as soon as I wake up, but
even then, I feel that I missed or misunderstood a lot of what he told me,
already beginning to forget it while I was writing it down. Also, when I read
through my own notes now, some of them make no sense. But afterward – and still
now – I feel shaken by the powerful emotion I felt in the dream. I’ll try to
explain the dream as well as I can.
The diver told me that a dark presence had taken over his
girlfriend (the woman in the photos). He’d tried everything he could think of
to banish it from her, but everything had failed. In the end, he finally
understood what he had to do, finally understood the true nature of the dark
place that was hidden under the waves of the lake where they lived. The lake
was an opening to dark place that was much bigger than the lake itself, in
fact, much bigger than the whole universe we live in. He wrote one last poem, his
masterpiece, a secret poem, a hidden poem, a poem that’s not among the poems
I’ve found in the shoebox. And he took his girlfriend for one last dive.
Together they sank down into the depths, far deeper than he had ever dived
before. In the dream, I was there, diving with them. And from the depths,
something, or some things, surged up to meet them. Things of darkness, but
bright things of light as well. The diver explained that these things, or these
presences, were forever fighting a war between the forces of light and
darkness. A dark presence had taken over his girlfriend, and a bright presence
now came to take over him. And he surrendered his body to it, but at the same
time, the essence of who he was kept diving deeper, ever deeper, holding the essence
of his girlfriend (their spirits? their souls?). The diver (or what was left of
him, his true self) spoke the words of his secret poem. The poem described a
new world, an island in this sea of darkness, a safe haven, a paradise, a
“baby” universe. The nature of the dark place was such that anything dreamed up
there, any dream or a work of art, would come true, just as true as anything in
our world can be. And the poem came true and the essence of the diver and the
essence of his girlfriend escaped from the darkness and disappeared into this
new world to live there happily ever after; while their shapes, his now taken over
by a bright presence, as his girlfriend’s had been taken over by a dark
presence, surged up, through the opening in the lake to our world, to continue
their battle there.
When I woke up I felt overwhelmingly happy and privileged of
having been shown this. I’ve never been so moved by a dream and didn’t think it
could even be possible. Even now, even though I’ve forgotten many details, the
feeling remains: a feeling of hope. I know that something amazing is coming, that
something wonderful is going to happen, and at the same time I know that when
it does, it will be something totally different from what I’m expecting,
something I could never have imagined. And I know it might take a long time
before it does happen, but no matter how long it takes, I’ll be here, waiting.