riverrun

Friday night I laid down in my bed, utterly exhausted and, admittedly, a little more than buzzed. Usually I am not able to dream on nights like this but I was soon immersed in an ethereal landscape, never before seen, but somehow familiar. Oddly enough, my dream began with a river. This river was shallow and erratic, flowing every which way, never changing depth, lazily moving across a grassy, marshy plain. Wading the river with four other people, I constantly found myself tangled in branches, hindered by beaver dams or woven in webs of rushes and grass. As I always feel intense emotions in my dreams, my feelings at this point were that of frustration and anxiety. My heart was heavy and I began to feel an emotion akin to dread. After wading the river for what seemed like an eternity, we reached an electric fence. Once again, I felt anxious as we gingerly crossed the fence, avoiding the wires. Soon we came to a small house haphazardly connected to a large barn. The house was yellow and dilapitaded, leaning slightly to the right. Upon entering the house we found nothing but a small kitchen that led into an even smaller dining area. There was a closet directly opposite the door that looked like an airplane bathroom and a mirror to the left of it. After finding nothing of interest we left the house and Brian, one of the other people in my group, left and caught a steer...

This is when my dream took a turn for the worst.

I'm not entirely sure if the steer had any significance but immediately after it was caught I found myself in an entirely different scene. My sister and I were in our barn at home, each of us with a horse. Sally, my sister, had her horse Urf Quake and I had mine, Stanley. Urf was extremely sick and he kept falling. As I left Stanley to help Sally with her situation, he followed me into the stall. As my sister's horse went down for the fifth time, Stanley was crushed underneath him. I somehow managed to drag him into an adjacent stall and as I sat trying to keep him alive he metamorphosed into my border collie, R.P., my dog that my parents had to put down less than a week ago. Crying and yelling for help, I sat on the floor of the barn while my dog died on my lap. I think this may have constituted as a nightmare.