One old dream I wrote down once:
The difference between this dream and any other is that there was absolutely nothing about it that felt unreal. It was as if I had actually lived through it.
I dream that I have a vision of a child hanging from a tree in a forest clearing.
Before that, I’m driving down some road that looks like the coastlines of the Pacific Northwest—kind of a winding, paved path near a dense woods.
Suddenly, I find out a little girl has gone missing in Italy.
I go to the police, recount my vision, and offer to help them track down the missing child.
They throw me in a car and we head south toward the Italian countryside.
While we're driving, it suddenly hits me—this landscape feels incredibly familiar.
We spot a man walking alongside a donkey.
I tell the driver to pull over.
I hop out of the car, approach this younger man wearing a hat who's leading the donkey, and ask him—is there a forest nearby?
He points me toward a trail right next to him and tells me it leads straight into the woods.
I set off, entering a forest packed with massive trees, maybe thirty meters tall.
I trek through the woods until I reach a clearing, a circle about twenty meters wide. The trees are towering, the sunlight floods the clearing, and I look up and see her—that little girl, swinging from a branch about fifteen or twenty meters up.
A child, hanging high up, swaying in the sunlight.
It was a moment filled with peace. It was as if her spirit was calling to me to find her body; there was nothing terrifying about it.
It felt as though her soul had finally breathed a sigh of relief now that she was found.
I felt that same relief too. A sense of lightness, like I had lifted a heavy burden off someone else's shoulders, like I had granted that soul peace.
In its strange brightness, the scene reminded me of Kennedy's painting "The Pauper":
