The first dream takes place in Salt Lake City, a place I have never been. Often, when I have dreams 'out west' (I grew up on the east coast and have never been further west than Chicago, IL) the dreams are monochromatic, dreary, gray, sad. This one was very colorful, probably more colorful than Utah actually is, or I imagine it has different colors than Upstate New York.

In the dream, a group of Quaker women wanted to protest the Mormon church, so they were going to strip naked at a public park owned by the city and jump into the Great Salt Lake.

They were planing on doing this specifically because some Quakers in Europe shortly after the Protestant Reformation used to go into Catholic churches and disrupt the mass because they thought it was immoral. The women would jump into the aisles screaming and take off all their clothes. At least, that's what they tell me.

There were counter protesters on the bank holding signs, and the media were everywhere. A group of women of all ages and races, after some speeches and some slogan shouting, took all their clothes off and took a dive. I wasn't part of this dream, I was just watching, like it was a movie.


The second dream took place in the middle of nowhere. It was like a science fiction movie, except I was part of this one.

Some sort of vehicle, an airplane or bus or spaceship had crashed out in this wilderness, a green and muddy flat expanse where there may or may not have been roads and houses at one time, but at this point there was nothing left. Many people were killed, there were families on board the vehicle, and most importantly, not a single adult had survived. It was all children, who had survived (some children had also died).

They eventually found themselves on the bank of a 'lake', a glorified mud puddle really, roughly ten feet across and probably 6 or 7 feet deep at the deepest. On either side of this 'lake' were white stone walls, and the ground in between them sort of sloped down wards, so that the walls were about 2 feet high when they started and 15 or 20 feet high when they ended, and there was a bridge over the water where the walls met the ground at their highest point.

The children congregated around this water, sitting in the deep, squishy mud by the lower part of the wall and generally being shell-shocked and confused.

"The Authorities", of what government I wasn't sure, set up a tent beside this pit of mud and water, and fished the children out one by one, cleaning them up, trying to find out who they were and who their reletives were, trying to determine how they were doing, etc.

I was one of the social workers involved in this effort, but my body was different than it is when I'm awake, it was very child-like. At one point I took off my clothes and went into the pit in my underwear, wading and eventually swiming into the water. I looked back at the bank where there were children sitting on their haunches in the mud, children splashing each other in the shallower part of the water, there may have been one drowned in the deep end with me as I looked back. There seemed to be so many. I climbed the high part of the wall and went back into the tent the back way. My collegues mistook me for a lost child they hadn't processed yet. I was covered in mud and they thought I'd come into the tent without permission. When the recognized me they laughed, and I thought to myself 'we have to worry about compassion fatigue', because there were grieving children in the tent with us. I began to despise myself and my collegues.

After a time lapse, we had gotten through all the children, and the water had dried up, to reveal a road that lead under the bridge, mostly over grown with grass or covered in mud from frequent flooding.

Relatives of the children and tourists had shown up, and I knew that's who they were because they had curious expressions on their faces and wore clean, colorful clothes. They were standing respectfully in the place where once their had been so much mud and misery, now just patchy grass and some stones sticking out of the earth. I had somehow had a shower, I was clean and in clean clothes, but barefoot. I could feel the cold ground and the rough stones under my feet as I danced, yes danced, down the road ahead of the others. I turned to look back at them, and I felt so different. I was separate because I had been on both sides of this tragedy, in the mud and fishing people out, they were just tourists, even the ones who would have to take care of traumatized children, they didn't know what I knew. I wasn't superior, just sort of alienated.

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