February 19th, 2014

I find myself at one of my old softball practices, but it isn't the actual field we would practice on. I'm standing in line with three other girls, and we take turns going up to the pitcher's mound and throwing down to the catcher, not pitching. I get to observe me as a child. I was slightly chubby, with an unflattering triangle-shaped haircut. I would be unremarkable if one didn't look directly at me. But as I came forward to the mound, I saw that I was very different and had a remarkable way for a girl of 10. I was very solemn. I moved slowly and had a look of deep pondering when I was not in action. My eyes were bright and made the heart ache without knowing really why. I felt very sad that this was the past, and in the course of events and choices through life, I had completely forgotten this girl. Young me wound up and threw, now moving quickly and with thoughtful intent, throwing harder and farther than the other girls had thrown, although it wasn't a perfectly straight throw... Later in dream, I am the only woman in a war regiment. I also have a son, whom I bring swaddled up and tucked in a carrier. We travel from camp to camp, coming closer and closer to the point of war. I drift away and back to this dream many times last night. It is a combination of the past and the present, we are dressed in old clothes and only have the comforts of the past, meaning very little, but the setting and the houses we pass are of the present. Now I am in a different dream and am in the near past. I have found an old dress, and I know it used to belong to a famous woman of the past. I travel down a winding green road towards the home of a historian who knows more about it. The road is beautiful and the trees just bow over with the heaviness of the verdancy, and the colors all around are bright and poignant like memories of summers in the past when the sun would slant and all felt so slow and simple, yet you knew that this would be a fleeting moment in time you would remember someday when looking through dust covered windows in an abandoned house. Back with my regiment again, and we are very close to the battle now. We have found shelter in a damp, dripping underground cavern with a stream running through it. We explore and have fun with what could be our last few days with each other and Earth. What an amazing place to be in the end... We smile and laugh with each other, and our hearts are surprisingly light. Someone is taking pictures of us, and I have the dress on from the previous part of my dreaming. I begin to take it off, and the men in the group are gathering around, as though they never really realized that I was a woman before. A picture is taken of me in a green, mossy, slick nook in the walls of the cave, halfway out of the white lace dress, some sunlight coming in from the nearby mouth, highlighting the the slick rock crags, the green of the moss and in my eyes, and the copper in my hair. I'm in the house I was traveling to get to before, and wearing the dress again as the request of the historian. She nods and looks at me intently. She says that this was the wedding dress of the old-time bank-robber's girl, who helped him jailbreak and was famous for her adventurous personality. We go to a cemetery, where the old historian woman points to the farthest row, farthest headstone to the north, a rose quartz slab laid flat on the ground, very unassuming. Though far from it, I sense that it says her real name instead of the name she went by in her life with the bankrobber, and that she is buried by her family, not him. Back with my regiment, we are going into battle tomorrow morning. We are camped beneath a huge willow tree, which offers meager shelter from a storm breaking overhead. The rain drips through the branches and saturates us through and through. My baby squirms in his carrier, and I feel how encumbered by wet swaddling he is. I loosen the fabric and pull him out of the carrier, letting him stand up and move around. He smiles big at me, and it cuts through the endless gray all around and straight into my heart.