Dream #1
In a dream, I see a tree in the forest, golden-yellow in the cool breath of the autumn sunset. An ancient specimen, it's huge. It seems like a giant from a forgotten age, obscuring the setting sun with branches that tower into the sky. I walk closer, noticing as I do the ropes that descend like tendrils from the branches, twisting around the trunk. I reach the base of the gigantic tree, and gaze in awe at the monster tree. I reach out to one of the descending ropes that have spiraled down the trunk, and as the rough woven length scratches my palm I am instantly transported back to the gymnasium of my catholic school (days long past) where climbing ropes much like these hung from the impossibly high ceiling, where I would idly watch them dangle instead of paying attention in weekly Mass. The tree-ropes, too, feel much too large for my hands, yet now I have the strength to grasp and climb the lines that wind, vinelike, over the branches and down the trunk in lazy spirals. As I pull myself up the trunk, I look upwards to the canopy, I see a wooden structure nestled so high in the branches, it must feel like a throne, leagues above the ground. I pull myself up the ancient trunk using the ropes, pausing only to run my hands over the gnarled knots, and wedge my shoes into narrow crotches where the branches met to pull myself up onto the next one. Despite its apparent advanced age, the tree somehow exudes an aura of strength. My sense of awe is matched only by the urge to trace my hands further up the spiraling ropes, reaching finally the treehouse constructed so sturdily amongst the lofty heights that I feel it must have been plucked from the ground and placed here by some primeval force. Inside, the treehouse is empty, apart from old leaves and the detritus of seasons long past. No clues as to its purpose or nature have been left for me to discover. Was this merely a treehouse built in some long-vanished backyard? Or had this place meant more? I had the feeling the latter was more likely, if only because it seemed right that way, in the dream. Although I have never visited this place before (in dreams or waking), the entire experience was intimately familiar in a déjà vu tip-of-your-tongue manner, but in this instance not a forgotten thought or word, but almost as if I could have repeated the experience of climbing the tree without opening my eyes, using only my hands to guide me... No scratched palms or scraped shins, only safe guidance from the roots of the tree to the top, where no view of the surrounding forest can be seen through the inpenetrable canopy. I realized somehow, through the faint orange haze of the forest at twilight coupled with the temporal fog of the dream, that a father had constructed this House among the branches, this refuge, with one person in mind: his only daughter. His little girl, who was so seperated from the world, and yet connected with it in ways difficult to imagine for one with the use of their eyes. Known in my dream only as the blind girl, her father had shown her the beauty in the world she had only needed to learn how to see. Her palms and fingers her eyes, she ascended the ancient tree and it welcomed her into its ever-waiting arms.
I decided to write about a dream I had. Thanks, Stephen King, for filling my head with stuff like this.