Lake Of Mine
Level of Lucidity: N/A Level of Cohesiveness:
Lucid Intent? No
This dream has been viewed 4165 times.
This was a very nice dream while I was having it; I was sad when I awakened myself. :(
I don't remember the beginning (I had several dreams or bits of the same dream as I napped upright on the couch), but it ended up with me sitting at perhaps a picnic table, on the shore of a great lake, at the edge of the woods. The trees were dense and let little light through but there was this sort of sourceless light that lit everything at least a bit; they seemed to be pines, with their branches higher up, so there was lots of space to walk beneath and between them, and a needle-carpeted floor, no weeds or undergrowth or stuff. I sat with the lake to my right side, but it must have been part of a bay or something as the lake bent at almost a ninety-degree angle behind me. It was evening and the sun was either setting or getting ready to set; the air was golden and warm, and it was so peaceful, and so nice.
I was at this picnic table or whatever it was and I was doing something that involved a book--homework, or else reading. It wasn't stressful. But I was kind of unfocused and got up to wander around a bit. I almost had the feeling of it being time to get ready to go to bed (even though I sleep during the daytime), you know, when you gather all your stuff and go inside. Only it was also a feeling of already BEING inside. Hard to explain but keep reading. I left my book on the table and wandered toward the water. I knew that this was Lake Michigan. I stood on the shore and then turned my head to look off to my right, across the water.
Kind of ahead of me yet slightly to the left loomed the vast shape of the Mackinac Bridge. The perspective was wrong; it's like the near end should have been much closer to me on the shore, as the bridge faced me almost head on, the towers visible from the front and almost lining up with each other. But I knew it was far away and far far off to my left. It was lit golden by the setting sun and the towers were warped somehow, stretched wider than they really are, and kind of squished flatter like somebody had taken an image of the bridge and stretched it at the sides. It was also much bigger than it should have been, considering the distance. It was slightly hazy too and I knew the distortion was because of the warmth of the air or whatever. I was a bit surprised as I hadn't known the bridge was right there. It was pretty as I stared at it. This is confusing and inconsistent as I knew this was Lake Michigan, BUT, if it was, the bridge should have then been to my RIGHT (where the lake seemed to turn in toward me). Since it was to my LEFT I knew I could not be on Lake Michigan but on Lake Huron. Then in the dream it's like I realized that if I wandered around in the water a bit, I'd actually wander from Lake Michigan into Lake Huron waters, so I must have been at the Straits of Mackinac, where these two lakes meet. When you face north from the Lower Peninsula, the water left (west) of the bridge is Michigan, and that to the right (east) is Huron. This didn't present a huge inconsistency in the dream though.
I looked down at the water and wistfully thought of going into it. Then it struck me like a bolt--I COULD go down into the water! I mean, here it was, waiting just for me! Surprised yet delighted, I stepped down toward the shore. I was now facing the water, yet the woods were to my left; the lake bent at a corner here like the edge of a pool, and stretched on ahead of me and to my right, but I never got a good look at how far the woods progressed; I only saw my table sitting nearby. Let me clarify that all a bit: If the lake was a square, I would have been in the lower right-hand corner, with trees along both sides stretching away from me, and the picnic table located on the bottom side. (The woods went down almost to the beach, with only several feet of shore.) I stopped where the grass (?) changed into gravel, as the Great Lakes shores are often pebbly. I could see the first foot or so of lakebottom descending and it was covered with water-smoothed rocks. Then it seemed to get steeper or slope more deeply and I could see absolutely NOTHING beyond that first foot or so. :/ Just darkness. I had no clue how deep the water was and that made me nervous.
I also didn't want to slip and fall; I was reminded of my slip and fall on a boat landing at the UAW Family Education Center when I visited Black Lake with my dad in real life a while back. During that incident, I was handling both of our digital cameras, and of course, both ended up getting soaked. -_- They malfunctioned and I was devastated...but they resumed working properly the next day, so it turned out okay. :/ Still, I now see the necessity of REALLY watching your step when heading into a strange lake. There was no boat landing here but maybe the pebbles were loose. But I don't think I had the cameras so aside from hydrophobia I can't think of why I was so careful. I didn't sit down but I seemed to be grasping onto the grass (?) of the bank behind me as I lowered myself carefully toward the water--more skewed perspective. My feet very carefully slipped into the water and I started toeing around beyond the first foot or so of gravel as I did not want to step off into nothing! o_o
At that moment, though, it's like my vision grew clearer, and though it was still dark, I could see more gravel on the bottom beyond the first visible foot or so, and knew it was not quite so deep as it had seemed. I eased myself into the water and started walking around. It was so nice and warm. The gravel didn't even hurt my feet. In fact, now that I looked again, I could see the darker bottom of the lake resolve itself into a sandy bottom with just an occasional pebble here and there. It felt so good as I walked around in it, splashing it with my feet. It was just like how Lake Huron felt when I stepped into it in real life at the city beach a couple of times earlier this summer--so warm! I dug my toes into the sand and nudged it around and walked around and around in circles. I glanced further out to the side and considered wandering out even further since the water was so shallow in this part. I hated the thought of having to get out and go back to my reading or whatever.
"I can come back here," I murmured, suddenly realizing that leaving the lake was merely a matter of almost stepping into another room--even that conveys too much of a separation or a distance from it. It was the feeling of this lake being "right outside my front door," almost as if the WOODS were my home. "This lake will always be here," I thought, with surprise. "It'll always be here, just for me. I can come back to this place any time I want, and it will always be here waiting. Whenever I want it."
This was EXACTLY the feeling I got--I was totally alone here, but that just meant that this part of the lake was MINE, mine to do with as I wished, my own "secret" safe place to return to at ANY time of the day or night--it was as simple as taking a step outside--even though there was no house present--I can't convey accurately the proximity of this lake to where I "lived," wherever that was. I can only try. It was a feeling almost like, I could be sitting in my room at night, and if I wanted to go to the lake, all I had to do was step right outside (even though my room has no door), and go right to it, like it was mere steps away. I had a similar feeling in real life a while back when I thought, "I could leave ANYTHING of mine--ANYTHING--sitting right here in the grass beside the garage, and when I come back in the morning, it would still be here, safe as anything, since this part of ground is OURS." I had thoughts of leaving books or my blanket behind almost as if the ground were the floor of the house--and aside from dew or rain or insects, it's basically true, even the grass and dirt in this little plot belong to us and they're there whenever I want to walk around on them. That's how the lake felt in my dream. Always there, whenever I wanted, and there was no inconvenience whatsoever in visiting it. As simple as just stepping outside whenever I felt like it.
This realization filled me with joy and I considered sitting here reading my book or doing my work or whatever, or returning at any time I wished. The thought of this little place I could always return to, any time I wished, no matter what or when, gave me such a feeling of overwhelming peace. I splashed my feet around in the water some more and then--
--Told myself I had to wake up, and I snapped awake. -_- Which was weird because it wasn't a lucid dream but I still did tell myself I had to wake up or I'd be late to log online. I glanced at the clock through bleary eyes and saw that I still had a few minutes (I wasn't totally awake yet) and tried to slip back into that sensation of splashing my feet in the water, yet I don't believe I was successful. :(
I've been slipping back into a depressive state and feeling utterly alone so upon awakening the dream seemed to have great meaning. I would so deeply love to have a place, whether physical or imaginary, that I can turn to whenever I wish, for whatever reason, and it will ALWAYS be there waiting to calm me and make me feel happy again. There is no PHYSICAL place like this nearby, so I assumed that the dream could be hinting at an imaginary place, something entirely in my head. There are places like this, one in particular (and it IS bounded by Lake Huron), but when I feel this utterly depressed, even it doesn't manage to comfort me, and I've never been able to COMPLETELY lose myself in an imaginary place so that I can escape my bad feelings. Though I've long wished to. :( So after I went through that possible meaning I looked at a more symbolic meaning. The lake was shallow but dark and very large--Lake Michigan, one of the country's biggest lakes. (No clue why it was Lake Michigan when we live near Lake Huron--though again remember how the two lakes seemed to merge in my dream. My only personal association with Lake Michigan is that it borders the city where I was BORN, and where I LEARNED (college), but Lake Huron borders the city where I've always LIVED.) Maybe the lake represented the unconscious/subconscious. It brought me comfort in the dream, which is kind of odd as the unconscious is often regarded as a frightening thing. (And I'm afraid of deep dark water in real life--even in the dream, not being able to see at first how deep it was made me anxious.) But maybe the lake/unconscious in this instance has something to do with my imagination? Unsure. I only just now got to thinking about the possible meaning of the pine forest. Pines are not my favorite kind of trees (I like deciduous, especially maples), but I do like cedars and I have a white pine I planted myself--the day before the dream I anxiously plucked a number of caterpillars off of it. I love forests and they make me feel very peaceful so it's understandable that I felt at peace at the picnic table under the trees, no matter what I was doing (studying?--reading?). Yet in the dream my attention was focused on the water and not on the trees, which is strange. It seems the WOODS would have brought me greater comfort than the lake. :/ But again...the fact that the lake was bordered by trees was part of the comfort of it. If it were wide open I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much. It made it feel like a secret place, all my own. And in the dream the woods were almost analogous to the place where I lived. (Remember there was no house, and I was doing a daily household thing at a picnic table almost as if I were sitting in my bed.) I've also heard deep forests referred to as symbolizing the unconscious. So there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on the unconscious in this dream, for whatever reason. Why would my unconscious be bringing me such comfort? I'm such a messed-up person that I think my unconscious would actually fill me with many bad feelings. >_<
I can't adequately describe all this, how it made me feel. I'll try once more. Hundreds of years ago, there weren't such things as property lines, and you stayed basically wherever you felt like it, and that one little bit of land was YOURS. You could put WHATEVER you wanted on it and it belonged COMPLETELY to you. Yet you weren't so DIVIDED from it as people are from the land nowadays. Remember my thoughts of leaving my personal stuff lying out in the yard and knowing it would still be safe, because that land was ours. In the dream it was almost a feeling of having the trees as my roof, the ground as my floor, and the lake as that place right next to me which would bring me comfort, like merely going to sit at a favorite window. I wasn't enclosed by walls but I WAS enclosed in my own special place, I was close to it, and it was completely mine and always would be whenever I needed it. It was a feeling almost of a secret place I could crawl into when I wished--it wasn't secret, but it was all mine and nothing could keep or take it away from me.
