turtle children

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out on a bridge over a river with my mother and my sister. We were in a pine forest in the mountains. The ground was mostly grey, and the sun was hidden behind the mountains, so that the atmosphere around us was a chill blue-grey. The bridge was hefty and stout, and it stood maybe seven meters above the river. The river was wide, a little shallow, with rushes of water occasionally broken by small boulders.

My mom was talking to me, probably about some family gossip that I really didn't want to hear about. I had turned away a bit and was looking down to the river. I was surprised to see two turtles swimming in the water. They were bigger than any turtles I'd seen in the wild: their shells were about a meter long. The turtles were so big I assumed they must have been sea turtles.

Hoping I wouldn't make my mom think I was trying to change the subject, I cried out, "Look! It's sea turtles!" I was now surprised to see the heads of the turtles. The heads, which were submerged under the rushing water, were a bright, vivid green-yellow, and as round and wrinkle-free as the head of a cartoon turtle.

The turtles' shells were now gone, as if the turtles had gotten out of their shells. I knew my mom wouldn't believe me about the turtles if she couldn't see their shells. But I was more surprised to see how strongly, swimming around in the water, the turtles' bright, green bodies resembled the bodies of human beings.

I was trying to think how I could prove to my mom that the swimming creatures were actually the "sea turtles" I'd seen. But I was more concerned with trying to prove to myself that these creatures were actually turtles. They resembled humans. But, I thought, that's only because they actually are (???!!!) evolutionarily very close to humans. And they weren't wrinkled at all. But, I considered, the wrinkly appearance of turtles only came, after all, from their being stuck in their shells.

Now three turtles stood up onto a wide, flat rock almost directly under the bridge. But the two green turtles were gone, and these three turtles were a pinkish purple, mottled on their backs with black spots like leopard spots, though I may have thought of them as giraffe spots.

The three turtles looked just like three little, naked girls, except that their heads were bald and a little more bulbous than human heads. I may have had the idea that these turtles, or turtles in general, were not just closely related to humans, but were actually a part of some extraterrestrial race.

I probably kept waiting for the two green turtles to show up. And I probably still kept hoping for a turtle to get back into its shell, so I could prove to my mom that I'd seen a sea turtle.