"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks..."
When my eyes opened, I was swimming in perfect silence. There was no sound of bubbles rushing over my ears or the distant rumble of outboard motors. No muted calls from birds above the surface or the low grating of water rushing over boulders. There was no sound of my lungs wheezing, even though I was not holding my breath at all. In fact, I could not feel anything either. No sand brushing against my chest, no horse-flies landing on my back, no cool water tightening my scrotum. Nothing I associated with swimming was there at all. No pier covered with sea-gull feces, no smell of stale algae on the sea-wall, no Grams waiting up the hill with goldfish crackers—no Buck with a long, cane fishing-pole.
I swam through a translucent, barely heterogeneous field of red. In every direction I turned there was the same rusted crimson. I knew where I was, though I do not know quite how. Looking into the distance, I could just barely see her silhouette. She did not paddle. She soared ahead of me-- and when I stopped flailing like I was under-water, I soared too—
I pulled-up, knowing that the haze below me must be at least a mile thick and the same throughout. With a click of my heels, I triggered the tiny jets in my space-boots and ascended. I was much deeper into this cloud than I had imagined: the layers began to get thinner and thinner but I wondered if there ever would be a true surface. As my suit lifted out of the fog, I saw the outline before me doing the same, leaving a trail in her wake like a sky-liner. Behind her, the gargantuan yellow orb of Saturn came into focus. I noted how much brighter it seemed from this distance: almost unstreaked by cloud bands, buttery hued, glowing in the light of an unseen sun. Come to think of it, I think that Saturn was the Sun—if the Sun had a smoky, glass-globe like the lamp in my bedroom. Suddenly, I breached the surface of the cloud ring like a humpback whale. In the next moment, panic ensued—now, I was on the edge, trying to rest on the surface without sinking back into obscurity. Instead, the momentum from my boots set me adrift: losing the surface and drifting into void. Then, I turned around...
It was a bed; a cross between the biggest king-size you can imagine, a set of 1960's retro rockets and a magic carpet. I say so because it had a head-board and footboard, about eight blue flames emanating from its stern and an abundance of Middle-eastern designs. On this most mystical craft, my beloved sister Molly was lying in the arms of a woman. The woman appeared to be comforting my sister. She impressed me as the most maternal woman I had ever seen—she was breathtaking yet warm. I knew that she was one and the same with the figure I was chasing in the red-cloud. Momma? Not my mother... too tall... no freckles or glasses... long, straight hair... brown eyes, of course, just like my mother (brown eyes are maternal in my sub-conscious).
I climbed onto the bed, suddenly unburdened of my space-suit and in my pajamas. I crawled toward my sister and rested with her—cuddling her like I never could in real-life. I thought "Now I don't have to be alone any more... we don't have to be alone..."
—all of this was after receiving the phone call from my sister at 6:30 AM. She called for lack of anything better to do, since there was a drunk man outside her door. He was convinced that he was at his own room. He was not. Once the RAs came to cart him away, my sister discovered he had drooled in several places on the floor...
I told her not to let him in (duh), then returned to my slumber-- and my dreaming. All of this was Sunday morning—-after Friday and before our lives were about to change yet again. It was not until that evening that I figured-out who the woman in my dream had to be.
Not Mom... not some future wife-figure. That was God. God is our Mother~ every good characteristic of motherhood ought to be something that God has. That's a backward way of justifying the comparison—as if mothers had those characteristics and God purloined them later (not the case?). ...of course, the God portrayed in the Old Testament does not always seem so maternal. I think (these are my personal feelings, not a Biblical argument) that they got Her all wrong... that She/He has to be more like the image Jesus conjured just before he entered Jerusalem to be arrested: "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! How I long to gather you under me like a mother hen gathers her chicks...". I needed to be plucked from outer space, like a lost sheep/coin/son... but didn't know why yet... (nor that it would be subject of the sermon later that morning...)
