Flood Waters (1898)

I did not wake from the dream gradually. I surfaced from it the way one breaks the surface of water. Too quickly, lungs still burning, heart already ahead of thought. My brother was there one moment, solid and familiar, and then he was not. The river had taken him with a calm indifference that felt more unsettling than violence. I jumped in without hesitation, my body acting before deliberation could assert itself, and found myself fighting a current that did not respond to effort or intention. I was not saving him. I was simply being pulled alongside him. I was being pulled under with him. That was the moment I woke.

For several seconds I remained suspended between states, unsure which reality carried more authority. The fear lingered in my body even as my cognitive mind began its familiar work of correction: I am home. I am safe. He is not in danger. Yet the reassurance arrived too late to fully dislodge the sensation. Stress, I am learning, does not reside primarily in thought. It inhabits muscle, breath, and reflex. I turned toward Cricket, asleep beside me, and rested my hand on her back. She responded with a small, involuntary sound. It was not affection exactly, but acknowledgment. It was enough. My breathing slowed. The current loosened its grip. I slept again.

When I returned to the dream later, in writing, I noticed that it resisted interpretation in the traditional sense. It did not behave like a message encoded in symbols waiting to be decoded. Instead, it presented itself as a mode of consciousness, a particular way my mind had organized experience under pressure. Dreams, in this light, are not stories the psyche tells itself so much as states the psyche enters. They are consciousness stripped of its executive oversight, perception ungoverned by the rules of waking coherence. The dream did not explain my stress; it enacted it.

This is where Monet’s Flood Waters becomes more than an illustrative parallel. Like the dream, the painting does not narrate an event; it renders a condition. The flood has already happened. The viewer arrives after causality has given way to consequence. Trees stand where they always have, yet their relationship to the land has been fundamentally altered. Their reflections blur into their bodies, and the ground itself refuses to assert clear boundaries. Orientation becomes provisional. One must look slowly, attentively, without the expectation of resolution.

In cognitive terms, dreams may be understood as consciousness operating without its usual metacognitive scaffolding. During waking life, I monitor, evaluate, and contextualize my experience continuously. I know what matters, what can wait, what belongs to the past. In the dream, that hierarchy collapses. Emotional salience replaces logical priority. My brother matters. Water moves. Action follows immediately from affect. This is not irrationality so much as pre-rational coherence. It is the mind organized around survival, attachment, and urgency rather than explanation.

Several waking threads converge here. Conversations with a friend in the Northwest about the atmospheric river flooding his region. The anticipation of traveling with my brother to his graduation at Northwest Missouri State, an event weighted with pride, logistics, and the subtle pressure of showing up fully. And beneath all of it, the sustained stress of my grandmother’s death and the responsibilities that followed: grief braided tightly with duty, memory entangled with administration. None of these experiences are catastrophic in isolation. Together, they saturate consciousness.

The dream absorbs these impressions and renders them as water. Renders them as a force without malice, as movement without intention. That quality matters. The river is not an antagonist. It does not pursue or punish. It simply pulls. This distinguishes stress from fear. Fear has an object. Stress has a condition. The dream, like Monet’s painting, captures that distinction with precision.

What becomes especially important, then, is the act of reflection itself. Writing the dream is not merely a record; it is a shift in consciousness. In psychological terms, this is metacognition. It is the mind observing its own processes. By returning to the dream deliberately, I reintroduce the executive functions absent during sleep. I name, contextualize, and relate. I do not explain the dream away, but I situate it. In doing so, I regain a form of agency not by controlling the current, but by understanding how I am being carried by it.

This reflective act mirrors the viewer’s position before Flood Waters. Monet does not resolve the flood, but he frames it. He slows perception. He invites sustained attention. Likewise, journaling allows me to hold the dream at a distance sufficient for insight without demanding mastery. The dream becomes neither prophecy nor pathology, but data: subjective, affective, and meaningful precisely because it resists simplification.

What remains most grounding is still the waking moment: the tactile certainty of fur beneath my hand, the soft sound of a living body responding. That moment represents a return not just to wakefulness, but to regulated consciousness. If the dream is immersion, reflection is shoreline. Not a denial of depth, but a place to stand.

In this way, the dream does not require belief in any grand theory of dream symbolism to matter. Its value lies in how it reveals the shape of my current consciousness. In what surfaces when control relaxes and impressions reorganize themselves freely. Like Monet’s flooded landscape, it shows me not what has happened, but how I am inhabiting what has happened. Writing it down does not still the water or slow the current, but it allows me to see where I am standing within it and maybe where it might be pulling me. 

Floating Above the Earth

Dear journal, 

Days like this feel rare and whole. No obligations, no fixed clock, no one waiting for me. I can stretch a 30-minute nap into an hour without guilt. My only companions are the four cats, each eager to curl up beside me and share the stillness.

I start my Naptime Classical playlist. The first notes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 9 in D Major brighten the room, each phrase like sunlight spilling over polished wood. A wet nose brushes my hand. I close my eyes and sink into the sound.

Debussy’s Deux Arabesques No. 1 in E Major arrives—its delicate arcs and swirling patterns lift me out of my body. I am floating, at first just above the bed, the room receding like a watercolor dissolving in water. Then the pull begins—slow at first, then inevitable.

The walls dissolve into a vast, endless black, pricked with light. I drift upward, higher, until the Earth itself is beneath me, shrinking into a blue-white marble. Stars multiply all around, some sharp and diamond-bright, others softened by veils of dust. Fauré’s Berceuse threads through the darkness, its lilting rhythm carrying me forward like a gentle current.

I pass through a drifting field of ice and rock, the silence absolute but for the music. A spiral galaxy blooms before me, its arms curling in slow majesty. Nebulae unfurl in colors that shouldn’t exist—deep violets, burning golds, a green so soft it feels like breath on glass. Planets turn silently below, one veined with rivers of silver, another glowing faintly from within.

Liszt’s Liebestraum begins, its yearning melody tethering me to something human even as I float farther away. Time doesn’t exist here—only distance, and the pull of the unknown.

Then Le Cygne enters. The swan is here too, gliding effortlessly through the void, its feathers catching the starlight. I follow it until the darkness folds in on itself, and I’m sinking once again.

I wake briefly to a sharp pounce—my foot has become prey—but drowsiness wins again.

Now I’m somewhere else. A house, but not my house. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 hums in the background, a slow pulse that pushes me forward. The air smells faintly of dust and something floral, like potpourri long forgotten in a drawer.

The walls look painted—too smooth, the colors slightly too bold—yet when I touch them, they’re cool and solid. Each door opens into another version of the same room: chairs in different places, curtains drawn in one, open in the next. The light seems artificial, yet I can’t find its source—no lamps, no fixtures. Shadows bend strangely, stretching toward me when I move.

I pass a framed family portrait in the hall. The faces are blurred, not with motion, but as if someone had rubbed them away with the flat of their hand. The glass is warm when I touch it.

Some rooms feel too large for the house—ceilings arching high above, echoes that take too long to return. Others are too small, cramped as if the walls had been pushed inward. The floorboards groan beneath my weight, but when I look down, they’re perfectly still.

Fauré’s Berceuse gives the moment a soft, lulling haze, but underneath it, something stirs. The light flickers. The air thickens.

They are here. I know it without proof. I never see them, but their presence is undeniable—a pressure behind my ribs, a sensation like being watched from inside my own skull.

I run. The house begins to collapse behind me, folding inward like a paper model crushed in a fist. Rooms buckle and dissolve into shadow. The Raindrop Prelude marks each step, the repeating note like a slow, relentless heartbeat.

I burst through a final door into nothingness—a void of wind and blinding light. The world erupts behind me, but the sound is swallowed before it reaches me.

I wake. Liszt’s Un Sospiro is playing now, each rippling arpeggio like water spilling over smooth stone. A wet nose nudges my hand. The other three cats have joined me, their warm bodies pressed close. Sunlight floods the bed. Dust motes drift lazily in the air.

The day is far from over, but I remain in that suspended state—hovering between the infinite and the familiar. Separate. Quiet. Content.

Always, 

Dave

The Last Banana

Dear journal,

Last night, I dreamed the bananas were gone. Not just scarce—extinct. Like some golden species of bygone eras, they had slipped quietly out of existence, leaving only yellowed memories in fruit bowls and cereal ads.

In the dream, I met a man who had made it his life’s purpose to bring them back. He carried a canvas satchel stitched with patches from every corner of the world. Inside it: vials of soil, hopeful clippings, sun-faded photographs of vanished groves. He said he’d once eaten a banana as a child, and the taste had never left him—sunlight wrapped in softness. Now he wandered from jungle to marketplace to seed bank, chasing a memory. He believed the seed still existed somewhere, just hidden, waiting to be found.

We spoke in a ruined greenhouse overtaken by moss. I asked him why he cared so much about something so simple, and he looked at me as though I’d asked why stars should return after night.

When I woke, I remembered that old clip of Kirk Cameron explaining—with divine confidence—that God had designed bananas to fit the human hand. As if modern fruit came pre-packaged by Providence, not by human cultivation. A joke, almost. One that lingers. The banana he held was a Cavendish—sterile, seedless, mass-produced. Not a gift of Eden, but the product of convenience, design, and the slow erasure of what once was wild.

And then I thought of banana pudding. Not the store-bought kind, but real pudding layered with vanilla wafers, whipped cream, and slices of fresh banana—soft, cold, and sweet. How would we remember bananas if they were truly gone? Not through memories of pudding or afternoon snacks or the bruised fruit in school lunchboxes—but through the artificial echo in something like a banana Runts candy. That neon, chemical tang. A parody of fruit. All that would be left is a ghost of the flavor, floating in the aisles of gas station candy racks.

Maybe the dream is about more than fruit. Maybe it's about the quiet extinction of the simple, the real, the once-vital things we no longer notice until they're gone. Or maybe it's about the seekers—the ones who go looking anyway. The man in the dream might be a part of me, or the kind of person I want to be. Someone who believes the seed is still out there.

It’s strange how a dream can feel like both a joke and a pilgrimage. A reflection of how we mourn what we didn’t realize we loved. Or maybe it was just about bananas.

Hard to say, 

Dave