Dreams

The sky is red. She’s running, but as usual, the landscape doesn’t change. She only knows she’s moving because she can feel the earth falling behind her as she pushes off it. She doesn’t know what she’s escaping from. The landscape is familiar: dry, red earth, a few trees (but not very large, and they’re also tinted red, almost as if a red light is subsuming everything), and then there’s the rock formations. She knows, as you can only know in a dream, that she’s somewhere between Extremadura and Monument Valley. But she can’t see the Mittens, or any of the other shapes that should make her certain of her whereabouts, she just knows. Just like she knows that somewhere close, someone is running with her. They are both escaping. Is it a friend?

She finds herself at the top of one of the rock formations, a very small platform that overlooks the flat plains below. She can see further than she has ever seen in her life. She doesn’t know how she got up there, just that if she’s not careful, she’ll fall. Should she climb down? Even in dreams she’s afraid of heights, but she loves climbing. Should she just jump? The jump is always safer than the climb, and if she jumps, and she dies, there’s a good chance she’ll wake up.

The sky has now turned blue, but it still looks red. There’s no water anywhere. Her running companion has disappeared (but did she ever see him?), but she’s still being chased. She wants to rest, but if she hides they will find her. Who? She knows, she is certain she knows, but she doesn’t know.

Night comes. Maybe it’s time to sleep? But she’s already asleep. After all, this is a dream. She looks around again. Somehow she is still in the same place, now at the base of the stony platform that she’d seen the plains from. But she knows that she has moved, made good progress for the day. But she shouldn’t rest. Is that a house in the distance? Better to avoid it. It’s white and has welcoming windows, and a red roof, and it looks incongruous in this Martian landscape. She knows someone is calling her, but she cannot hear things in dreams.

Her friends are sitting around a fire, and they are getting angry because they can’t understand her. She knows why: the dream is in English and they’re speaking Spanish, even though to her it sounds like English. “What language do you dream in?”, they scream.

The huge tree looks like a baobab but it has maple leaves. It rests, stretching its boughs towards the sky, breathing. She respects it. Her friends have gone, but they haven’t left her. They stopped being angry when she was able to understand. The fires are getting closer, but she knows she won’t burn. She picks an olive from a tree next to her, and eats it. It’s hard and bitter. She remembers she could just wake up. And then she remembers the time, years ago, when she woke up in the same bed, in the same house, with the same parents and the same dog, but they were all different and the world had changed. Maybe dreaming is better.