I’m on vacation this week which, among all the other great things about vacation, means waking up naturally, which always means a better recollection of dreams. Here’s what I remembered when I woke.

I dreamed I was on an island and saw a pod of leaping dolphins. The sky was all pinks and purples and golds, like a postcard, and the dolphins were silvery-gray and beautifully curved and powerful. There was so much awe and joy, people at the beach hotel came pouring out on the beach and started dancing in a sort of joyous frenzy, watching the dolphins leap and spin. Some of the dolphins even came up to the shoreline to nose the sand before playfully twisting back to deeper water, and everyone on the beach laughed and sang together. And yet, no one tried to touch them, we just let them do their thing.

Then I dreamed of rain. I was sleeping alone in my room back home and woke in my bed to the sound of rain outside my open window. When I looked, the sky outside was absolutely black and the raindrops came in through the window, strung like crystals – varied in size but all tiny – on threads finer than a wish. It was ethereal and magical, and frozen in time. The strung raindrops just hung there while I looked on, amazed, and listened to the sound of a light rain that continued uninterrupted outside.

Then I was in a hotel again. Or, on top of one. I woke in a huge, luxurious, white bed on a rooftop in the middle of a metropolitan city. Next to the bed was a late-90’s/early 00’s-style stereo with a 5-CD changer and tape decks and a radio alarm feature. The alarm went off and my parents, who were not my parents, said they’d be back as they left. It seemed totally normal to me to be in a gigantic feather bed on a rooftop in the middle of a city, though I felt weird because it was my parents’ bed and I wondered where they had slept.

Then I was in a hotel room. More specifically in the bathroom. I knew that two men were coming for me, to hurt me, and I didn’t know where I was, so I called 911 on my cell phone and told them I was in trouble. I had to sneak back into the room to get the pad of paper with the hotel’s name on it to tell them where I was; I can’t remember its name but it’s nowhere I’ve heard of in real life. Then I couldn’t remember the floor/room, which I managed to choke out just in time, as I heard the lock being broken and fled to the bathroom. I heard sirens and saw lights coming, but I don’t know what happened.

Then I was being held again, same room, by two guys who were barely out of their teens and who seemed more nervous than anything. Nervous and angry and unsure. I was in my underwear; they didn’t rape me, didn’t even fondle me, but the one with dark curly hair used a serrated kitchen knife to cut my left thigh a couple of times, sort of on the inside/front, very close to my lady parts. I was able to run from them because, like a couple of amateurs, they were concentrating on the TV, I think it was a news story about them, so I snuck past them while their backs were turned and bolted out of the door. It was on some kind of island because I jumped out a window and landed at the top of a huge sand dune, which I had to slide down to get to street level. I did that run that feels like you have to grab the air to pull yourself along, like legs just can’t move fast enough, like no speed could be enough. I ran to the town hall, where the mayor was the same guy as the President of Strahta from Tales of Graces f, which I played for like six hours yesterday. He took me to shelter with two older women, one of whom looked like Judi Dench from the 007 movies but with very smooth skin, and the other who looked like Gena Rowlands. The former mostly sat on the couch and was sarcastic but in a funny way, you could tell they were a couple who cared very much for each other, and the latter sat at a little round table correcting her last set of English papers before leaving the teaching profession to start a job with the government. She was conflicted about it.

The last thing I remember was a trial, a jail, and meeting up again, fully clothed this time, with the two guys who had held me captive and cut me. We all became sort of friends; not sure how that happened.

Dolphins are joy, crystals and rain are energy storage and emotion; bleeding from a cut/knife is loss of energy or loss in general. An island can mean creative expression or isolation (or both?); beaches are borderlines between the conscious and unconscious, where power can be drawn from the ocean. Water, again – emotion. Water is always emotion. The bed is also a borderland, same kind, but the source of power is the return to the “universal womb,” a desire for safety. Lots of hotels – places of transience, of something temporary. An old woman can be wisdom OR a part of the self that’s no longer needed.

I’m not sure what it all means – store joy while you can to guard against bad times? That seems very fortune-cookie-ish, and an almost too-easy distillation of a dream that seems like it went on forever.

What do you think?