Last night’s dream was rich. Certainly richer and more memorable than the majority of my nightly mental theatrics. While most of the dreaming was a veritable nightmare laced with foreboding and dark shapes, there was a touch of the beautiful.

Steffi and I were starting out on a walk in Pine Mountain from the ¾ of an acre my parents own there. The old plum tree was still standing, not yet diseased and hacked down, its ultimate real-world end a mercy killing. The air was mithril, clean, and lucid, and surprisingly it came as no surprise to see a silvery column of luminescent fish, all in a straight line, a stack of 9 or 10 swimming in place -- above the ground, but below the gnarled tree’s bare black, spiky branches. Approaching this glowing, eerily undulating, piscine mobile, we saw the near invisible spiderweb holding the fish in place, only their tails wisping back and forth.

Shortly after this magical interlude, the dream recaptured its original darkness, and I fled the scene, again running from whatever evil my synapses had cooked up.