Dreams

My dreams in stressful times always involve water. Water rising around me. Waves lapping at the windows. In the better dreams I’m in a boat on top of the water.

Perhaps it started when as a small child I fell off the end of a dock and a cousin pulled me out of the water. Perhaps it’s just because water is a classic representation of overwhelming circumstances.

In one dream I was in a boat on a sea with a vast dome above—not only surrounded by water but trapped from above. But somehow I found wings and was able to fly out above the boat up into the dome, where I found a window. Wings were my liberation.

And so Aviana is the part of me that, like a bird who, as Victor Hugo describes, pausing on “boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her and yet sings—knowing she hath wings.”