I am awoken by dreams

The beaches of Sydney are beset with waves – tsunamis that loom from the horizon without warning. Denying physics, the early warning signs of the surf being sucked from the sand into deeper water do not come. Where this absence of water from the shore accumulates, stacking upon itself. Upwards. It rushes the slow inclines screaming towards land.

It’s one of those recurrent dreams. So much so that they are familiar within them. I am writing to work them through. They are beyond scary, with my fear of deep water. My concerns are always with the loved ones I know are at “the other beach”. When the wave is spotted, I sprint for cover. This morning I wedged myself between the fences of my primary school. They are flimsy, chunky, bouncy even. But they sieve me from the torrents.

They come at intervals. And the shore is battered many times. Between them, some people continue to swim and eat ice creams. How were they saved the first time? Did they dive beneath the water walls to clutch sand? Letting the waves move through them? It’s an impossible dreamscape.

In previous incarnations I have seen land beaten and torn. Chunks of coast are taken into the ocean. The people from the beach run inland, jumping gutters, fences, rows of cars. They reach fields that are wide-skyed. Grass is a deep ochre red, hip-height and is moved only by zephyrs. Elysian fields? We live on two planes. We land on top and the water is ‘beneath’. It’s no level field. We remain above when the mass of the world is below.
This morning, when I finally found my family the only injury was my mother’s ankle. I piggy-backed her away. Jason carried an old woman (a disguised Hera) across a stream losing his sandle. Blessed by the goddess he was announced to the court of Iolcus as the man with the one sandal. Making a rightful claim to the throne, the puppet King gives him a seemingly impossible task. If I can get to the end of the dream, will I lose a thong carrying my mother across a wave?

Are there collective night terrors from that ‘Boxing Day’ tsunami? The thought of it turns my toes. When cyclones hit the Solomans and the smaller islands of the Pacific the land is so flat that only tree climbing keeps people above water. Our poles are melting. Ice, our bank of H2O is seeping. We are threatened by the rises of interest rates and oceans. We lament day in day out. In my dreams, Armageddon is not a purging by fire and brimstone, it is a reclaiming of land by the Earth’s blue desert.