Dream Journal

I’m in the back yard of this house. There are a few huge trees right behind the house. They’re massive, gray, and old, with several dead branches near the ground. A couple long ones reach out horizontally towards where I’m standing. I imagine for a moment how a squirrel could jump up to one of the branches. I see it happening, but I know it’s my own little scene. Then I decide to test the branch nearest me. It’s about as thick around as my leg, but seems totally dead. I grab it, put some of my weight on it. I hear a crack, but see nothing change. Wondering if it’s going to fall, I release it and push it forward at the same time, and the huge branch breaks free from the tree and falls to the ground. It wasn’t an effort to push it to the side, so it didn’t seem to have much weight.

I walk up to the trunk. Another huge tree is right next to it, their bases having grown together. I see a gnarled opening between them. I don’t think I could fit through, but I look inside anyways and am amazed to see a long, narrow passageway going through what must be a dozen tree trunks joined together. I’m walking along inside the passageway now, and it’s maybe 30 feet long. This is amazing! It occurs to me that this is amazing enough that we could make it a tourist stop along with the one a few houses down, and the many others like them along this road.

I leave the tree and find that the back yard has become a room in a house. As I look around the room, I can see the original connected trees to my left, and then to make sense of the long corridor within, a continuous row of trees beyond it and then growing into and merging with the wall in front of me so that the wall was covered in smooth bark that rolled over the crown molding and curved into the ceiling.

I run to get Rebecca and Holly. They come. I want to make a dramatic presentation of it, so I say, “okay, start looking here at this wall” and I direct them to the wall opposite the trees. The wall has windows in it and knick-knacks on shelves, but is semitransparent, showing the fields and forest beyond it. But they look directly at the huge trees. Scale is strange here, because we’re all a size that makes sense if this is a room, but we’re much too large for the backyard scene on top of it. I show them the opening and passage inside.

Now we’re inside the tree passage. Steve is there, and a few others, including my Aunt Janet. The passage is slowly transforming, though. Steve says “Look, there’s a door here.” and I turn and there’s a huge door in the center of the passage facing the house. I can see the house through it. It definitely wasn’t there before. I open it and it seems like the owners had built an access into this tree passage. But as I look around the tree passage some more, it’s transforming more and more into the inside of a camper. There’s a table, and a tiny kitchen, and soon there’s no trace of it ever being a passageway inside of trees. But that idea is still in my head. I exit the camper and see the giant trees growing over and around it. The camper has wheels, and so I figure the trees must not be attached to the ground. Can the whole camper with the huge trees on it be pulled down the highway?

I’m messing around outside the camper and it begins to roll backwards down a slight hill. It doesn’t go far before it stops suddenly, but the sudden stop affects Janet, who is not even inside it anymore, but further down the hill (she might be “inside” the tree passage, but from outside the much smaller camper, she appears outside). She’s knocked off her feet and lands flat on her back. I yell “Janet!” I’m thinking how old she is and how bad that would be for her, but it must occur to me that this isn’t physical because I don’t pursue that line of thought. She gets up.

All four of my lucid dream alarms went off last night. Each time my focus flashed to the physical side, I felt I wasn’t within a dream. But those little shifts in awareness back and forth have definitely increased my dream recall.