Member-only story
The River of Our Lives
A Vivid Dream 7
This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories, I give first-person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.
I’m walking through a forest with my girlfriend by my side. In real life, we’ve already broken up. But sometimes in my dreams we still spend our time together. Sometimes my sleeping mind hasn’t fully wrapped its head around the notion that we’re gone from each others lives.
But as we walk through this forest together, there’s an unspoken tension between us. We love each other but our conversations are punctuated. Airy pauses color the spaces between each of our words. The jagged silence is like wiry trees shaking against a brittle January sky.
Beside the forest is a river. We’re both dragging kayaks along behind us as we make our way further and further through the woods. The trees begin to give way to a marshland with a series of rickety wooden walkways winding through it. As we reach the marshland and begin making our way down one of the little boardwalks, the rushing river begins to sound more audibly.
