Island Life

Alarmingly little is passing through my head of late. Inspiration is running at a trickle. The old stand-by of righteous indignation coupled with an ill defined anger requires energy and a cause. I am fresh out of a cause and running low on energy. Opinions are on a hiatus. 
 I dreamed, again, that I was in a foreign country. It seems the arrangement was temporary. I felt a deep desire to stay. I knew I had to go. I befriended a family. They had small children and were adventurous. In the dream I was exploring a part of an island with one of the people I met. I knew, intuitively, we were not suppose to wander so far nor were we to follow the road we chose. The girl I was with assured me that all would be o.k. We went through an awful mud bog and as the path rose and curved to the left I heard then saw a group of men descending the path towards us. They were dark, short, stout and muscular men. They were talking loudly to each other. My companion said we should be quiet and let them pass and for a minute it seemed this would work. Not far past us one of the men turned and looked back. He growled rather than shouted something in a language I did not know and all of the men gave chase after us. There seemed no hope of rescue. I remember the fear I felt as we ran ahead of them. We took a sharp left down a path that, if memory serves me right, led to a large body of water and, as is the way of dreams, we were suddenly in the water. It was a beautiful day. The family I met on this island moved toward us on a boat waving cheerfully while asking how we came to be so close by while exclaiming how fortunate it was to find us. It was not that we were rescued as they did not have a clue about our scare. It was a disarming response in the total lack of surprise at finding us in the water with no boat of our own. The response felt oddly familiar and yet it reminded me of a song being played with all the right notes except for the ones just played and no one noticing at all. The dream progressed with a number of sequences and the inevitability of my departure weighing on my mind. I wanted to stay and I wanted to go. The entire dream had a discordant note. That aspect of it resonated with me. I don't remember anymore of the dream. I know I planned to leave. I felt torn but also felt uncomfortable about staying. The people I met and the experiences I had with them were intense yet shallow. The idea of staying was becoming more for them than for myself. I began to feel that I was pretending to want to stay and I woke up.

This is the second or third dream I have had of traveling to a place unfamiliar to me, meeting people and wanting to stay but finding myself torn between returning and staying and, at the end, thinking how I was pretending to want to stay as if I should want what was offered in the places where I found myself and as if I should believe something I could not fully believe nor could I fully let go. All dreams ended at that point.

I woke up feeling as if I left in the middle of a play and did not know why. The other feeling is that I was returning somewhere that held nothing for me. I was puzzled and conflicted.