I have this recurring dream.
In it, I am dressed in white-gold silk, and my hair falls down to my shoulders, too perfect to be real life, and my skin is as smooth as butter, so I must be asleep.
I stretch my cocoa fingers outwards in front of me, and in my blurry, unconscious state, I realize that I am in a boat, sailing out in impossibly still waters, not a breeze in the air.
I stand to peer out at the vastness of nothing before me, my silken dress hem barely brushing against the wood of the boat. And I realize that the sea I am in is not blue, but gold, as it reflects the gold above me, and the outlined silvery clouds, like paint on a canvas. In fact, the sky does look like paint— like something painted on the ceiling of a famous French cathedral, something I must have saved to the backs of my eyelids like a movie I could watch any time.
I sail out on this golden expanse, and the reflections of what I presume is sunlight glint against my silken dress. I dip my fingers into the water and wonder how to escape this haze.
I decide to leap into the golden sea and see if I can touch the bottom, and though I am deathly afraid of water in real life, my dream-self is unafraid and breaks the surface.
The water is just as gold here, but my hair and dress billow upwards, as if they are straining for oxygen. I swim further downwards.
It's as if I'm going nowhere. The water is still gold and bright and unbothered by my presence. There are no fish. Almost in anger, I kick downwards again, and then— somehow, gravity takes hold of me and I am sinking faster than a stone. My mouth forms the shape of a scream lodged in my throat.
And then I am in the boat again, not wet, and my hair is once again perfect. I stare at the golden depths in confusion, wondering how on earth I was going to escape this sparkling, unfamiliar ocean.
As if answering me, a rope is dropped down from the sky— and my hands grasp it every night. I want to climb on the rope and find out who set it down to me, to help me from this golden sea, so I wrap the rope around one of my hands and gauge the strength of it.
But instead of climbing the rope as I had originally planned, I pull on it as hard as I can. I keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and there is piles of rope around me, making the boat sink deep into the water, but in some sort of rage, I pull and pull and pull.
I finally sink below the waves, surrounded by excess rope and a little wooden boat. As I attempt to break the surface of the water, the ropes find they have a life of their own, and instead of the water drowning me, rope cinches around my body and sucks out the last bit of oxygen.
I wake up in a cold sweat.
