I dreamt about drowning. I dreamt that I was in an old building, an ancient stone theatre, the type with walls of off-white stone, of odd-shaped alcoves and of curves. I dreamt, somewhat oddly, that we were seated, crosslegged, like a school assembly, that there was a band playing who came on stage in horses.

Out of the corner of my eye, as it was daylight, I could see the thin blue line at the horizon, and it was taller that it used to be, topped by a thin white undulating bar. Tidal wave. It happened quicker than I could react. A wave demolished the wall behind the stage, flooded the room, and rose to me in three seconds. Like many others I climbed. Not all were so lucky. I reached the roof, and there I could survey the flood as it swept through the rest of the city, the alleyways and market stalls turning to a muddy brine, the people and detritus of wood and market goods swept away until it could no longer be seen.

The water, having eventually subsided then was sucked back into the sea, as all floods are, the sudden loss of pressure in the centre results a vaccum, and they suck. (Think of a bad James Cameron/Leonardo DiCaprio film, if you must). From my waterlogged, shellshocked vantage point of a roof sodden as people drowned below, air turning to water in their lungs, muscle turning to weight, people to statistics, I turned to see the corpses of ships exhumed from the ocean floor by the tsunami, the earthquake tidal wave, floating awkwardly for a brief second as they were deposited by the waves on the beach as the water could no longer carry them, they sat on a grave of silt and deckchairs. And then the ships were sucked back. I was sucked back too, the world became blue and wet and sound became merely an undifferentiated swirl of white noise.

Water filled my lungs, my nose, my eyes, my ears, I opened my eyes to see the ships floating again, the buildings torn apart around me, people ripped limb from limb and become merely natures puppets, and things went dark and light at the same time.

And I woke up.

- posted by Mark @ 10:56 am