The World Dream Bank: Heron-Tank

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Heron-Tank

Dreamed 2020/11/12 by Wayan

I talk with a heron in a marsh atop a tower. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

The silveregg tower makes me dizzy, but I
monkey the ladder. Humidity. In.
The tank cups a marsh of flowering green;
bay windows ring this womb in the sky.

Reedy pond. Great herons. Blue the view.
These waterbirds speak! They tell me how
they see our earth: "Road, field, stone--
an underworld of souls half-grown--

still flightless squawkers. To swoop below
may be a small death--or a hatching from
our nest-egg." Sigh! The pond's not my home:
my books'd rot. No tanks! Yet O

the fresh, to speak with sane creatures again
free of that stifling material plain.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Fliers nesting above the human plane: I'd just reread Dragonsbane, Barbara Hambly's slow-starting but eventually powerful fantasy. Jenny Waynest, a witch in a dark and darkening age, is so hungry for magic that she lets a dragon seduce her into becoming one. I'm sure Hambly's core image--the urge to just fly away from human frustrations--provoked my dream, even though my climb to birdland didn't make me a bird. But I do gain, like Jenny, a little aerial perspective.
They see us as recently hatched: flightless, squawking, greedy, complaining... a responsibility to nourish and teach, one undertaken lovingly, but... exhausting. Are these great birds guardian angels? If so... diving back down to our underworld would be reincarnation. And my climb up the ladder would be... no, not death; shamanic dreaming. Similar effect, though!
Herons in a small wetland look down on rural humans: toss out my mystical and fantasy interpretations, and the dream makes sense as simple politics. Farmers and small-town voters elected Donald Trump, who stripped environmental protections from pocket wetlands like this, shrinking habitat for waterbirds. They may be living up here precisely because America's evicted them.
Note the date! I dreamed this just as the full 2020 presidential election results became clear. Biden won strongly nationwide, but in farm country like that of the dream, Trump and the Republicans were highly competitive--even though four years of him had left the Heartland generally worse off. Seductive dragons sometimes wear skin. My dream's frustrated at an illiterate Dark Age, all right... but not just the one in my nice escapist fantasy book.

Oval watertank atop a tower. Dream sketch by Wayan.

LISTS AND LINKS: towers & ascent - coasts, beaches & marshes - vats, tanks, cups, reservoirs - eggs & ovals - dream beings - animal people - birds - herons, cranes, storks, swans - house & home - the astral plane - perspective - politics - ecology & environmental protection - dream poems - pencil dream art - an epic dream inspired by my first reading of Dragonsbane: Diurnal & Nocturnal Gods

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