Odd and Beautiful Dream

Five years ago minus a couple of days, I had horrible nightmares about the people still trapped beneath the just-ruined World Trade Center. I can't imagine a worse death than that-- being trapped all alone in the dark and dying slowly. My now-ex tried to wake me from one of these nightmares by touching my back, and I promptly burst into hysterical tears for all those people. "No one will ever touch them again," I sobbed.

Given the reminder of the fifth anniversary of the attacks and how prevalent it's been in the media these past weeks, I suppose it's no surprise that I would dream again of those who lost their lives, but this time it was no nightmare.

Very early this morning, my spirit wandered outside my body, floating here and there, suddenly expanding vastly in awareness.

How can I explain such a strange thing? To my dreaming self, all times were now. All places were here. And the air was full of spirits, bright shining spirits rising to the sky. From the ruins of the WTC, from the Pentagon, from a field in Pennsylvania, from the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there were more, so many more! From Gettysburg and Iwo Jima, Valley Forge and the Alamo, the killing fields of Cambodia, the plains of the Sudan. Everywhere, everywhen, spirits were rising to the sky.

And they were singing.

I'm not even going to try to describe their song; no words of mine could ever do justice to it. It was everything.

How I wanted to add my voice to their song! But I could not; my spirit could not fly as theirs could, and so I could not sing as they could.

So I wakened, overwhelmed perhaps by what my subconscious had created for me to see and hear. And now there's nothing to do except to try to make things better for those of us who can not yet fly.