Dreaming - Judy Albietz

The dream couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. It couldn’t have been longer than that—could it? But it felt like an all-night dream. The kind that has a beginning, middle and an end.

The dream started out in the coolness of the late summer morning. The air was heavy with the smell of fresh-cut grass and fertilizer. She was on an escalator with her two friends, Josh and Sam. No one was talking. The stairs were moving rapidly. At first it seemed like it was going down. She could see that it made a wide curve. But then it looked like it was going back up again.

Josh gently pushed her to the right and edged his body around to be in front of her. He half-turned toward her as he stepped his left foot down to the next step. Sam was behind her, a solid dog fur wall, taking up the entire space of the escalator’s width, probably four feet. She couldn’t see behind him, couldn’t see where they had gotten on this escalator.

She couldn’t see anything to her right. She felt the coolness of the five-foot-tall chrome wall that moved along with the escalator. On top of the wall was a hard black rubber handrail which she could barely reach. There was no rail to grab on the left side. It was wide open to the air around them. Josh was balancing like a surfer on the stairs. She looked over his shoulder to see what was beyond and below them. They were very high up off the ground. People were walking and cycling on a path which wound in and out of the park-like setting. How did they get on this escalator? How were they going to get off without killing themselves?

She wished she had a way to write down this dream. She would only take ten minutes so then she could contain it, keep it within the confines of the ten minutes—so it couldn’t be real.