I had the strangest dream today. It was in third person and it had a narrator, telling me the story. This is normal for me but the dream itself was weird. It looked like a terror movie in the beginning. Two kids moved with their parents to a strange house. The older one was named Violet, the youngest was a boy whose name I don’t remember, but I woke up with “Elias” in my head, so I will call him that way. The house had a sinister kind of energy, the kids were scared, there were paranormal things happening, they wanted to go away but the parents didn’t. Eventually, they started to become sand. Their skin looked sandy , with little grains falling with the wind; when they coughed, they coughed sand. I stopped dreaming it and started to dream another thing, completely unrelated, in first person. After a while, the dream of the strange house and the sand people came back. It looked to me like a long lost memory. Time had passed.

The kids weren’t kids anymore, but they still held the energy of kids. Both of them were still sandish, but they looked like birds. They had gained paper wings. The narrator said, loud and clear: “When Violet gained her paper wings, she spread those and flyed away. But ‘Elias’, when he gained his paper wings, did not fly away from the house where he had moved so young, in which he had married, and where he unfortunately still lived. He cannot stay there. He shouldn’t stay there. But no, he didn’t fly away”. I woke up like “WHY HE DIDN’T FLY AWAY?”. My sleepy brain tried to come up with answers, and I got to the conclusion he died in the house. I wrote the dream down to analyse later.

What I realize is that when I saw Violet flying away I didn’t feel like she was a human anymore. She wasn’t just similar to a bird, she was literally a bird, because she accepted she was no longer human. She sacrificed her previous identity, so she could fly and start anew. Elias, on the other hand, was too attached to his human identity. He looked like a bird, exactly like Violet, but he didn’t want to let the human behind. 

That’s why the narrator talked about “the house where he moved so young, where he married”.  Because he didn’t want to accept his transformation into a bird, it was incomplete, therefore he didn’t fly. He died among the sorrows of the identity he cultivated. The fact I didn’t remember his name is symptomatic. Because he refused to transform, he was forgotten by history and time.  About the sand part, I think it was a representations of the consequences of fear and sadness: they started to dry inside, lose their hopes, dreams and childhood wonder, to the point they became just like sand – dry, arid, devoid of moisture.

I think this dream says a lot about the transitions in life. About our constant process of death and rebirth while still alive. And what it takes to grow into something new. Also, it talks about traumas over which we have no control, but that to stay in the trauma is a choice. Sometimes we have to let go of out sand identities, and fly with our paper wings.

22/09/2020
Morgana Lino.