I live on a wide coastal plain. One day we get news of a quake overseas. A tsunami is likely to hit our coast in a few hours. We must evacuate. But we're on foot, amid flat sands and dry mud. No vehicles, roads, towns, or hills near. It'll sweep right over us!

After a panicky start, I recall some low hills, miles southeast of us. Best of bad options. We start out. Since the shore's shallow a long way out, the wave will mount and break out there; we're likely to see a slow muddy flood, as on much of the Japanese coast around Fukushima. Maybe with less debris, since it's so bare here.

A long hot sweaty hike... Hours.

To my surprise, we find those low hills hide a town. Empty; they fled farther inland to higher ground. But this is the highest we can reach on foot. Its east end rises higher than I recall--at least 30 meters. I start feeling hope; surely it won't reach that high.

Walk around that neighborhood seeking the very highest point. A big wooden hall, left open...

The flood comes. Rises, slowly drowns the whole town in mud. Creeps up to our hall. And starts to swallow it. We climb to the roof. The murk rises past the gutters. Past the roof-ridge. We're standing waist deep, balanced on a ridge we can't see in the mud. One by one, my friends get washed away--or knocked, by floating debris.

The black flood keeps rising. The roof has a flagpole. I start shimmying up, shoulder-deep in water, let it half-support me. I'm alone now. Slowly climb, shivering. Stubbornly cling.

As I reach the pole's top and the mud reaches my neck... a chopper comes. Rescuers dangle a rope ladder. I'm so cold and tired, but with my last strength I snatch and cling, wailing like a drowning kitten...

...and am saved.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Forced march: I have a genetic mutation causing random bouts of tachycardia (racing heart). Tonight I think it happened during REM! The dream tried to explain the pounding heart as sustained effort.
• Hot near-desert, then cold water: During such attacks I often get alternating sweats & chills. Again, the dream tried to explain this with reasons I'd be hot then cold.
• Climb hills: Literal. I climbed a steep hill lugging a heavy keyboard for our band's rehearsal, then up another to meet friends for dinner.
• Perseverance saves me: I'm illustrating a dream called Range that argued creativity requires favorable conditions--among them, free time, health and safety. This dream seems to point out external conditions that can block me:
  1. I felt jerked around all day by others' requests--no sustained free time. Deep work can't be done in little scraps.
  2. The Big Quake may wait thirty years or come tomorrow, but it WILL come. And may well generate a tsunami. Will it erase all my work to date?
  3. Trump seems to be trying to pick a fight with Iran to get him re-elected--or let him cancel the election. Chaos and war! Splendid people-smotherers.
• Dreamed the same night: Mermaid versus Trump. Water and violence again! In that dream it's political--and malicious. Consider its nature, too: not clear water but the black mud that drowned so many in Fukushima. I think it's mudslinging. The torrent of slurs and lies being flung as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up.
• ACTION: patience and persistence. Don't give in to despair.

MONTHS LATER

Today this dream looks a bit different--a deadly tide that's invisible at first, just media reports you could choose to ignore, but relentlessly rising, closing in, till you're dying alone of fluid in your lungs... Doesn't that seem more like a premonition of the Covid-19 pandemic? If you can call it a premonition--when I dreamed it, the virus had just landed here in San Francisco, though undetected. Consciously, that is--but the dream knew.

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