Oct
6
the ‘This Is The Sea’ dream
I recently lost an old friend. If I had to say who was my best friend in high school I’d probably have to give him that title. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t talked to him in over 20 years, but at a time in my life where I didn’t have a lot of friends he was one of them. He was generous to me at a time when he didn’t have to be.
He was actually voted Most Talented our senior year. Not that he was particularly talented; it was more of a reflection of just how untalented the rest of us were.
He went on to live a very happy and successful life, good job, wife, kids, until one day he just fell over dead.
And since then, after not speaking for two decades, he’s been talking to me a lot.
The song that featured in the dream is This Is the Sea by The Waterboys. I’ve always loved the song and interpreted the lyrics in a very similar way as Waterboys chronicler Ian Abrahams did when he described the song as “…an instruction to throw away the old and embrace the new, catch the train, see the previous existence as something old and gone. It’s as though there is a split personality, the war raging inside the head, the mental anguish and the internal argument. Treating (life) as a journey, comparable with the traveling of the river into the sea.”
Then came the dream.
Very lucid. Very detailed and very long.
I was sitting in front of a small crowd being encouraged to play a song on the guitar I was holding. The room itself was equal parts café and conference room. I had no intentions of playing anything and I stood up to leave.
That’s when I heard a loud voice in the back of the room imploring me to play. I looked back and saw my old friend standing there smiling. Broad and toothy.
Without any hesitation I sat back down and played This Is the Sea. Every note of it.
These things you keep
You’d better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea
Now if you’re feelin’ weary
If you’ve been alone too long
Maybe you’ve been suffering from
A few too many
Plans that have gone wrong
And you’re trying to remember
How fine your life used to be
Running around banging your drum
Like it’s 1973
Well that was the river
This is the sea
Now you say you’ve got trouble
You say you’ve got pain
You say’ve got nothing left to believe in
Nothing to hold on to
Nothing to trust
Nothing but chains
You’re scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
Scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
But that was the river
This is the sea yeah
Now I can see you wavering
As you try to decide
You’ve got a war in your head
And it’s tearing you up inside
You’re trying to make sense
Of something that you just can’t see
Trying to make sense now
And you know you once held the key
But that was the river
And this is the sea
Now I hear there’s a train
It’s coming on down the line
It’s yours if you hurry
You’ve got still enough time
And you don’t need no ticket
And you don’t pay no fee
No you don’t need no ticket
You don’t pay no fee
Because that was the river
And this is the sea
Behold the sea
When the song was over the dream ended immediately and I woke up. It was only hours later that I started to try to understand the dream and it was only a few minutes ago that it made me cry.
Now I will never hear the lyrics the same way. He was using my voice to sing me a song, offer up some advice and ask a few poignant questions to boot. Is life the river and death the sea? Was my friend visiting me to tell me to relax a bit and enjoy the journey?
Should I be less worried about the sea?
I have no idea.
The subconscious never fails to amaze me. Where the fuck did this all come from?
I don’t think this particular burst of honesty and confusion deserves to be featured and at the top of the website, but as I am about to depart on a trip through Louisiana and Texas and I decided to post a 9-part story until return I had nowhere else to stick it.
Plus, it’s the least I can do for an old friend. An old friend that will no doubt be sitting shotgun as I make a lot of long drives in the coming days.
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