Keeley Schroder | April Challenge
Writing prompts for every day in April
Day 28: The Funniest Dream You Ever Had
The challenge was for funny dream, and funny can mean weird, right, and weird can mean don’t understand it, and yet dreams can inspire. This dream did inspire me.
Dancing In My Dreams
I thought once I’d got it out of me… you know… mastered it in some way, given it some musical justice so that it wouldn’t haunt me the way it does.
Haunt is a strange word for something so beautiful that comes to a sleeping mind, filling it with such grandness. Yet, all I can tell you, is that no other word truly represents the circumstance in which I’m continually visited and revisited by the vision of this dream.
I always wake up tearful, sobbing sometimes, not tears of distress you understand, but joy; the sheer joy of finally understanding something that perhaps lies beyond this world.
I say perhaps because ultimately, I’m a writer, but before that I’m a human being, a mortal soul as different and as complex as the next. Sure, it’s a dream, how could anything so splendid, so huge, so enthralling, and so unbelievable be anything else?
I was a young man the first time the dream enraptured me. I didn’t understand it; this strange, haunting, beautiful sound, watching a boy carrying a torch as he enters into the valley, a valley that felt galactic, a sumptuous cavity buried between the hills of my life.
Thunder rolled its weight from every corner of the sky, not a menacing sound, more a heralding. But the boy, such a boy, his complexion could have been that of every skin color, his hair blown wild, and his face…well, his face, yes, but that’s for later.
I see this boy enter the valley from my lookout high on a hill. I do not know in the dream why I’m here, or why I feel so infernally alone. I’m merely a spectator to what is coming…battalions, legions of men, women, and children following the boy holding the torch, all carrying bright banners, streams of silk flowing like rivers into the valley. Their faces are full of joy, dancing, and the endless thunder of their feet rolling in and peeling across the valley floor.
I sit on the hillside for days…days I tell you, blissfully deranged, listening to the thunder and the beat of the drums, watching the millions pass by. It’s like, well it’s like each of their faces is known to me, of my kind, my nation, my life actually born of their dancing, following the child with the torch.
Darkness comes and goes, hunger is satisfied without eating, sleep …I don’t know…I just don’t know. From deep within the thunder of the valley’s flowers, reverberating upward through wind shaken willows, the drums sounding from the outriders on their horses, a feast made of music, every taste exciting, a constant breeze of pure sound that I could not turn away from, nor wanted to.
I had this urge to join in. Who is the boy with the torch? Why do legions follow him? Is it the light in his face, the constant peace that emanates from his being, his youthfulness?
Where is he going…from where? There seems no reason or rhyme, just endless nations of people, joining hands as if they’d never known borders, war, or religion. Or they’d know every bit of it.
I cannot say what whirling feeling possessed me standing there on the hillside, just that when the last perfection disappeared from the far end of the valley I was left wanting, hungry, waiting for something.
The thunder of humanity rumbled into the distance, and the music in the breeze quieted. I knew the serenity of it all was leaving me, standing there alone, a troubled boy seeing something of the way it all should be. The whole of humankind, marching, maybe, to what lies beyond, and I was less fearful, caught up in the whirling celestial tide of humanity.
Finally, overtaken with silence, the music spiraling out toward another place I don’t want to wake, and when I do, want to lay down again and sleep soundly amid the peace of knowing what lies beyond.
Other wonderful writers engaged in this challenge. Read and enjoy.
If you’re not listed below and wish to be, Why? 😁
Send Keeley Schroder a nudge, you’ll be welcomed.
Adrienne Beaumont | Autistic Widower (“AJ”) | Brett Jenae Tomlin | The Sturg | Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles | Trisha Faye | Karen Schwartz | NancyO | Katie Michaelson | Bernie Pullen | Michelle Jimerson Morris | Amy Frances | Julia A. Keirns | Ravyne Hawk | Pamela Oglesby | Toni the Talker | Tina | Pat Romito LaPointe | Ruby Noir | K. Joseph | Brandon Ellrich | Misty Rae | Karen Hoffman | Deb Palmer | Susie Winfield | Vincent Pisano | Paari | Marlene Samuels | Ray Day | Randy Pulley | Michael Rhodes | Lu Skerdoo | Pluto Wolnosci | Paula Shablo | Bruce Coulter | Ellen Baker | Kelley Murphy | Leigh-Anne Dennison | Jennifer Marla Pike | Carmen Ballesteros | Marlana, MSW| Patricia Timmermans | Keeley Schroder | Jan Sebastian | And let’s not forget the indomitable, charming, incorrigible, the delightful, yes, please welcome Mr. Harry Hogg
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