I run from the top of the bank of escalators. I run. There's another woman running on the other side of the corridor. We are underground. We reach the part where the ceiling is glass. The ocean is racing us across the glass ceiling. We run. She is not connected to the web of which I am a part. I am in a movement, part of a revolution. This is the apocalypse. Because of my connection, I have some responsibility towards her. I won't abandon her to this fear.

In the dream, high on the realization I've dreamt this before. This trope is part of my for so long unremembered dream universe. I am part of some clandestine integrated whole. White robes. A longing for transformation in history.

Small table. Social. English speakers talking about their life in Costa Rica. Their expat scene holds nothing for me. Slide into daylight ruminations on urban versus rural as home for me, longing to live in a country in the South.

The Cape Lookout beach. No sun. No source of light. Grey above and below. Dark and light shades of grey. I can't see the ocean. Under my feet, packed, flat sand. Ridges of pebbles and rocks. I hear the ocean over an incline. There is nothing but shadowy air, dark coarse sand, ribbons of small and large stones, the sound of the ocean. No seaweed, no plants, no garbage, no objects.

Was that where the sandy cliff and grasses were when I camped here for my birthday last summer? The winter storms hadn't yet washed the land barrier away. There was a cliff face then. I stood on it and looked down at the beach full of people. I walked down the steep walkway to the warm sand.

In this absence of light, I see a group of four or five people walking. One woman has a bandanna on her head, like in an old photograph of my mother on a windy beach in the early sixties. She's part of a group walking towards the water. Far ahead and far behind them are other groups.

I get closer, to the top of the low incline. The ocean is on the other side. It is wearing down everything. It has worn down everything. The land barrier was once here. Dark sand, dark pebbles, black rocks. The ocean churns. I walk north, in the direction we walked on our real world visit in the winter. The campground has all been worn away. The ocean has poured down night tides. The ocean has flowed over this small ridge. The ocean has flooded what was the campground.

I don't think I've seen it like this in sunlight and now it's all dark. I don't think it is night. It is neither night nor day. All is darkening. All is shading into black. Shiny black rocks rolling in the surf, smaller black rocks above that, coarse sand above that.

I walk along the surf. What I can see becomes thick, until the greyness everywhere is almost opaque. There is almost no difference between what would be the sky, if sky existed, and what would be ocean and land.



I wake up within the dream. there is a part of me that is very strong, very cold, very decisive, who says this is not a good idea. This is too strong, this is too cold. This is too dark. I am deciding to end this. It is not right. The iron will grey stone strength inside me is worried about my safety, but I don't worry because I am strong, I extend everywhere, I am relentless. An identity is surfacing from me. This will happen. It is this strong part of me. The stone grey part of me. That says: no.



I open one eye in the dream and see my bedroom in black and white. It is different, my visual perspective is not from where I am sleeping on the bed. A shade is open and some light comes through a curtain. My dream self sees my room in black and white from outside my body.



I woke up enough to know I had an alarm set to go off in twenty minutes. I went back to sleep. And I think then was when I had this following dream.




I am someone who might be someone like me or someone like la artista, walking along a small ledge along a stone wall or incline and above a river. I walk along what starts out as a pathway three times. Each time the path grows more and more narrow and then disappears into the stone wall. The third time, I look up and see that the real path is at the top of the wall on my right. I get it that I chose the low road, the easy path, not wanting to go up the hill, but that to continue along the river I have to go back once again and take the high road.



~~~~~~~~~

Death, loss, depression, and the strength that comes from having experienced sadness and grief. The ability to explore the underworld. The strength to look into the dark, to inhabit the dark. A gift to bring back to the world of light.