The tidal wave and the cave
I rarely remember my dreams. Or rarely longer than upon the moment of resurfacing from sleep. But there is one dream that has returned to me several times now, in different variations, over a period of time.
One morning, in late January 2020, this is what I wrote on the first page of a fresh diary:
Last night I had a dream like I have had before in the course of the last years: from my house, I can see an enormous tidal wave approaching, a massive wall of water. I close off the house, the windows, everything I can. I make for shelter, curl up in what seems like a protective corner. The wave arrives. I can feel the house shake to its foundations, but it holds.
I emerge unscathed, every single time. The dreams are tension-filled but not nightmare-terrifying. The house that I find myself in looks different every time, and I am rarely alone, but the people with me don’t always have names or faces. This time, though, everything is familiar: the house is a hybrid of places I where lived or that I frequented as a child, and the people who are with me, are my family.
This time, the dream exceptionally continues after the tidal wave has passed. We are walking around the house. In the garden surrounding it (you know how landscapes will change in dreams, what was first a sea-side building is now a house in the woods), a mature tree has snapped, caught mid-trunk. That unfortunate event with the tree was to be expected, my husband says. We continue down into the garden that is in fact a forest and I discover, half below ground, the impressive root network of another tree, that has undoubtedly always been there but that hadn’t struck my attention until now. The space below its roots is cave-like, vaulted.
The dream of the tidal wave, whenever it arrives, will come at the eve of very powerful and transforming events in my life. Of course there’s no telling that at the time. But since I have kept my journal for years now, I know that this truly is the case.
Sometimes change will catch up with us. Like a storm, a tidal wave, a force of nature.
My dream tells me I live to tell about it. The forces that have their way with me, can be enormous, but my internal stability (the house) will stand. Some other things, however robust, will perish, snapped in mid-growth to never recover. All that was left from the tree in the garden of my dream, was a pillarlike stem crowned with splintered edges pointing at the canopy of its fellow trees far above.
But the most important element of the dream, this time, was the vaulted dome of roots. The old, rooted wisdom located in the subconscious of the earth itself, revealing itself to me by allowing me entrance.
And there is something else.
In late January, when the first soft whispers about Covid-19 found their way into the media, I had not only started writing in a brand-new journal, I was also deep into writing a new novel. The book will be published in August 2020 and be called At the roots of the world (in Dutch: De wortels van de wereld). It talks about the fragility of the things we love, and how a force of nature can jeopardize everything from one moment to the next. What was once familiar, changes irrevocably into something that is beyond all recognition. The beacons of certainty and security fall away. But in the story, the deepest, oldest wisdom, guarded in the roots of the world itself, is within reach of those who have the courage to descend down into the caves.
Next week, I will read a little excerpt from it in this column. For I can’t shake the feeling that, exactly like my dream, this story might be very much in tune with everything we are going through together, right now.
This column is one of a series originally written and performed in Dutch for The Saturday Night Shuffle, a Radio Lede program by Jan Huib Nas. I also get to choose the music that accompanies the column.
