Swamp Skeleton Dream

This was a vivid dream I had a few nights ago.

There was a man's body lying on the ground in the forest near a haunted swamp. A group of hunters discover it and do what seems the decent and necessary thing to them: they cremate the body. They are superstitious and horribly afraid that if they leave the body alone, something horrid from the swamp will take it.

But what they don't know is that the body is really a being from the swamp in disguise. It must wait for the hunters to leave, and then it rises from the fire, still smouldering, in skeletal form. It runs toward the safety and mystery of the swamp.

For now, I am an observer in this dream. I feel sympathy for the poor walking bones. It needs to hide itself in the mud among the trees to heal itself.

I know there are many other such bone-people nearby.

Night is falling, and as I follow the skeleton into the failing light, I suddenly become a creature myself--something lithe and amphibious. I run over grassy hummocks poking out of the water and then splash down into dark pools without fear or concern.

I am a night creature, a water creature, and I can see in the dark quite well. Living things are lit with a dim purple glow to me.

I think to myself: "This is my true place, a place where skeletons walk and werewolves caper. I am not afraid."

I swim through black water and see a group of beings with thick coiling eel-like tails, all lit with soft purple. I swim among them. I am not afraid of them. They are selkies and will not attack.

At least, this is what I believe. Suddenly webbed fingers reach out and pull me deeper under the water. I am surprised, but only panic a few moments later when I realize that the selkies are holding me down and I have lost my power to breather underwater.

I awoke with a start and a gasp for air.

On the bright side, although my unconscious dream-state is obviously still roiling around with er, swamp-creature issues, my waking life feels much happier than when I last made a post.

The dance group is making the best of it, and we DID have the one practice where ALL of us danced together---it made a lot of difference to how I felt about the overall cohesion of the dances.

I called back some of the friends I ranted at to let them know I was feeling more chipper about it all.

And since this swamp dream, I've gone on to have perfectly lovely dreams where I am having coffee in a little shop in London with Kim, and collecting sea-shells and treasure in a magical temple by the sea. So luckily, it's not all swamps and unfriendly sprites in my mind.

This dream was not actually a nightmare, by the way. I immediately wanted to go back into it because it felt such an mysterious world.