Dream #1, first night.

Two nights now, I have had confusing dreams, ever since my father went in to the hospital. On the night he entered the hospitals emergency ward, I endured hours with him in pain, but left for my home to rest. I immediately went to my chair and fell asleep and dreamt; I was home in Ontario, Canada. Down the street from the house I grew up in at Robinson Lake, actually on the lake, in a small boat drifting. I began a searching of memories that seemed to play-out like a video. I looked for old trees I've climbed as a kid across the lake, for the sand dunes I hid between, shivering, naked and covered in course sand glinting, stuck on my toes. Memories of my secret places. Suddenly, while I sorted through these memories, sences of recall, it became very cold and such a fog of calm storms fought me. Without rain and without wind the waters rose and pushed me further out, until I could not see the side I was headed to, nor the side I started from. I saw the long weeds that swept form the bottom of the lake then laid on top of the angry, grey waters. The weeds that I feared, those weeds when I was young and with friends who and I were always trying to avoid, swimming just before the lands of the weeds. In as they(weeds) tried to wrap and slide around my legs and body. Those weeds grew each year growing closer, reaching me at times and sending shivers about in imaginary thoughts of water snakes and unknown, those spined, curly-edge, writhing, slimmy weeds. As the storm circled around my bout I had no paddles, no motor, no way of getting myself back to the shore where I started from. I reached forward and pulled the heavy water along the sides of the boat, I felt with every pull of water those long weeds, the burn of fright on my finger tips, the thought of cuts from the weeds. Every time I reached into the water the weeds held my arms and tightened with every new reach forward, the closer I pulled the water to me, the more I tangled in the weeds from my past, but the clearer the rocks of shore became. I began to feel bigger and stronger, as though every stroke of fear cleared by fight. I ripped up the grey, green ribbed water and seemed to become larger and larger, so large that when I reached the rocks on shore, I reached down and lifted the boat out of the water like a toy in one shaking, wet, tired hand. I stood on the shore and looked back at that past and thought to myself, maybe I really do not miss this place at all.