A Place From My Dreams

We all have places that we recurrently visit in our dreams. For me, one of those places is a beach. I walk it with my father. We walk down this beach with a thick forest on our right. Then we come to grand houses in the distance, with a huge sloping lawns coming down to the beach. We have to scramble up a wall and scamper across the lawn and past a dock to the other side without being seen by the people in the houses. Then there are more woods on our right. The trees press in close and hang low, making the beach thin, thrilling, and just a little scary, like we might be pushed into the water.

Finally, the woods give way and there opens up a huge lawn with a house in the distance. I'm convinced that the farther you walk down this beach, the more thrilling it will become. But right at that point, the beach ends and we are faced with a drop into an eerie, broad, slow-flowing river of thick black water. Beyond that is a foreboding empty field of marshland.

I know that we have now reached the end of the explored world. Nothing exists beyond this point. I remember thinking turning around meant having to go back through the part where the trees come close to the water, which wasn't something I wanted to do.

I never knew why I dreamed of such a place. Now I do:

I just discovered that beach while wandering around the online version of the twisting coastline near my grandparents old home. I must have gone for a walk on it with my father in my earliest childhood and had no memory of it anyplace but in my deepest subconscious, where it still lives after almost 40 years.

It was a cool feeling: Sitting there realizing that I was looking at the real-world version of a place from my dreams, and I thought I'd share it with you.