I dream in colour and regularly experience lucid dreaming. The other night, or should I say early morning, I had a bizarre sleep excursion that I cannot stop thinking about.
So, I have the drone’s-eye-view and I’m at 30o off horizontal, looking down at the edge of Vic Falls.
The guys have tied a harbour rope to a staunch tree on the Zambian side of the river, on Victoria Island, where you enter the river in the winter to reach the Devil’s Pool, a swimming spot on the lip of the Vic Falls gorge popular with a small segment of courageous, if not foolhardy, tourists.
On the end of the rope, in the middle of the river, bobs a wooden olive barrel, cut away at one end, with a person clearly visible inside. The barrel floats to the lip of the Falls and goes over, held a couple of metres below the lip by the rope, offering a closeup view for the barrel’s passenger of the water rushing over the edge.
The object, I instinctively know, is to take video from this angle of the water as it begins to drop into the chasm.
Switch to me in the barrel, now a stowaway that the barrel’s passenger is not aware of. The barrel is full of water, which exits through the cutaway, allowing the passenger to breathe while water pours at speed and under some pressure over him in what is beginning to look, to all intents in purposes, like a sarcophagus.
I am inside the barrel, under the water, and, characteristic of the spatial distortions of dreams, there’s enough room for me to watch the passenger trying desperately to get the video camera operative. Bizarrely, I am aware that footage thus gained can hardly be spectacular for the dangerous effort it has taken, and similar could probably be gleaned from closeups of much tamer white water in rapids further up the river.
I surface and we both look at the falling water, with glimpses of the rock washaway behind the curtain of water.
There is a sense of urgency because, after a given time, a Landrover will begin to pull the rope, the barrel and its contents back over the lip and to the safety of the river bank.
I had this dream four days ago and it has stayed with me, clearly in every detail, like some kind of typically pastel-coloured African setting Attenborough-Cousteau hybrid documentary.
They say you never dream anything original – everything you dream about has its basis in something you once saw.
But I’m flummoxed by this one. Short of my fascination with the Devil’s Pool, also swimming at the Bridal Veil Falls and in the Valley of Desolation, I cannot think of anything that’s happened to me that would have inspired this dream.