There’s a place I see in my dreams. It’s a flat meadow with several tributaries trickling off a small creek behind a stack of boulders at the back of the open space. A few wildflowers grow in the grassy spots, but nothing thorny or dangerous. It’s deep enough in the woods to be away from road noises, but somehow I know I walked there from wherever I live. I’m always alone there, but never afraid. Birds sing, and the water laughs over smaller rocks while I climb the boulders to sun myself. When I dream of it (which I do on a regular basis), I feel like it’s a real place. A place I found once while rambling and kept a secret for myself from everyone. When I wake, I can’t remember where I might have been living when I found this sanctuary, or even how old I might have been the first time I saw it.
In my younger days, I often went rambling alone, especially when I had some troubles to work out for myself. There’s a magic to wandering. Only then can you truly believe you might find the faery court on their way from one castle to another. As a kid I often spent time in the marshes near my house, building tiny twig bridges from one puddle to another. Later, in my twenties, I wandered through the woods behind a house I was renting, and came upon a huge expanse of fallen trees. I live in the Carolinas, nowhere near any logging, so I wasn’t sure what might have been happening, but it was eerie to gaze across at all the broken wood. Another time, while on a vacation on Holden Beach NC, I woke up early and needed some time to myself, so I went walking, and found the most amazing deep bowl in the dunes at the end of the island. It had to be twenty-five feet deep, and entirely isolated. I sat at the bottom of it for ages, just meditating in the blissful calm. The bowl was washed away during a hurricane a few years later, so I’ll never go there again. I quit walking in marshes long ago, and I don’t rent that house anymore, so I have no idea what happened to the dead trees.
My dream place, though…I don’t know why I can’t remember when I first found it, or where it is in real life. It’s possible it doesn’t exist in this time and space at all. The older I get, the less I believe I’ll see it with my eyes again. I may have found it in my childhood, or in another life, or it may be entirely imagined. Regardless, it refreshes my soul to visit it in my dreams. My son calls it my Silent Hill (referring to the beginning of the video game Silent Hill 2). Who knows? Maybe it is. Do you have one? Tell me about it.