Silent Forest, Waking Dream.

        The first dream of the night, that I remembered, was completely and totally silent. This is really unusual for me, so it stuck out as odd. I was in a forest, and had just run out of path. I could see the path clearly back the way I’d come, but I didn’t want to backtrack at all. However, the brush and trees, so obligingly alongside the original path, had grown across the path so thick, that just a few yards in, you couldn’t even tell if there had been a path. I seemed to be heading generally West, so decided to follow the setting sun as long as I could tell where it was coming from. I didn’t know what I would do if I didn’t come out of the woods by nightfall, but that was still hours away. As I walked I noticed that I couldn’t even hear my footfalls.

        I picked up a large stick and used it to hold the bushes aside where they were too thick to just walk through, and I noticed that there was no sound from that action, either. I spotted some birds zooming through the tree tops, and they also made no noise. I found that I was enjoying the silence, even though it was an odd thing, I accepted it as normal after a very short while. I seemed to walk for a couple of hours, fighting my way through the brush less frequently as time went on. However, it was becoming clear that I wasn’t going to make it out of the forest before nightfall, so as I walked I began looking for someplace fairly protected to spend the night. Finally settling on a nook between two large black roots. The ground was warm from the decomposition of the leaves, and I had a fleece throw of some sort in a large pocket on the back of my jacket. Soon I was tucked in on top of the warm leaves and under the fleece throw. I knew it wouldn’t completely keep me warm but enough. I hoped I could fall asleep before I was uncomfortably cold, I know that I would sleep most of the night if I could get to sleep soon enough.

        I wondered if I should be concerned about large predators, but dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it arrived.

        I nodded off. (I love it when I fall asleep in dreams. I wake up wondering if I’m dreaming, because I’m not in the place where I fell asleep.) That seems to have been the theme for the rest of the night. I couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep, in bed or in the nook between the old tree roots.

I dreamed I was trapped by small animals beneath a pile of bedclothes and unable to get my hair out of my face.  Only, it turns out, I wasn’t dreaming. Well, I was, but it was also real. Nothing like waking up and thinking the dream has continued, so I didn’t even try to pull my hair out of my face until N’s alarm went off, and I realized that I was awake, not still dreaming, and the cats were, in fact, piled all over me.

Ad astra per technica,

FF