Random Blog Clay Feet: August 27, 2006
Feel free to leave your own comments or questions. If you would like to be in contact with me without having it published let me know in your comment and leave your email address and I will not publish that comment.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Strange Boat Dream

Strange dream this morning. Got on an old yacht-like boat on a decent sized lake with my family. After pushing out a ways we stopped to begin cleaning it while the kids swam around. Used a strange ladder that was custom built to reach halfway across the deck and attached to the rail to slide along the rail.

Before all that, someone was describing the boat – said the only feature was a house in the middle and a bubble at each end that stuck up above the flat deck. I observed that the square bubble in front was about a king-size bed with a window hatch in the bubble like my sister's old boat. The house in the middle was the pilot house. Later in the dream those both shrank to just round holes in the deck as the whole boat kept getting narrower until by the end it was very narrow, tall and long.

At first, the few times we actually ran the boat it was fast. Sometimes people would be in the water or someone would fall in – like when a skier goes down – and the boat would go in circles. The wave the boat created while trying to stop was sometimes much larger than the boat and would overwhelm the boat and all of us making everyone but me afraid. I would explain to them that this was normal and to just wait until the wave subsided. This happened two or three times.

Then while cleaning the boat as we were drifting around I noticed the wind had pushed us to the side of the lake which was now not much bigger than a pond. I started the engine and went a few yards back toward the middle of the water and shut it off again to clan some more and let the kids swim. It drifted over to a chain-link fence along the right side of the lake and even bumped the fence.

Ziggy was now on board (our daughters unusual cat) and I couldn't keep him from jumping over onto the fence and escaping into the yard past the fence. The area was semi-barren with brown dirt and clay showing and some junk and clutter here and there – maybe some people on the land but I didn't notice much else. Then another black and white cat jumped up on the fence and got onto the boat and I couldn't keep him off.

We then drifted into very shallow, muddy water where it looked like the area was an old dump that was now partially covered with water. There was mud exposed above the water with ashes and pollutants. I wanted to get away from all this and get back into deeper water to protect the boat. I started the boat again and had to rev the engine to plow through the shallows and mud and junk. The engine was like a jet boat that sucks in the water and expels it so I was very uncomfortable having to plow through all this mud an debris. I was worried about the effects on the jet pump and damage to the intake and even the bottom of the boat. But it didn't seem to hurt it a great deal.

By this time the square pond was not much wider than the boat was long. As I steered hard to the left and plowed through shallow spots the front of the boat swung around barely missing the opposite shore. By this time the boat had very surreal proportions – maybe like four to five feet wide, twenty feet high from the keel and fifty feet long. Trying to turn around such a strange shape in such shallow water caused it to finally fall over on its side. My wife was worried about it falling on top of the kids in the water, which it did, but it didn't appear to hurt them. After finishing turning it 180° and getting it into deeper water it slowly began to right itself again.

After that I wanted to run it awhile in cleaner water to flush out the clay, mud and any debris that might have gotten sucked up into the mechanical areas. But I couldn't go very fast because the pond was only about two and a half times as long as the boat itself. The surroundings of the pond were just empty fields of semi-dry grass on one side, woods at the opposite end from the dump, and the chain link fence on the other long side.

By now I could only run the boat forward and backwards in a straight line. I was starting to get really frustrated and noticing that my circumstances were much more restrictive now and wishing for more water. Then I woke up.