The First Dream

 The other day, at the end of the Big Freeze that we had, I went outside and discovered that the sun had warmed the roof sufficiently to make some melted water run through our drains.  There's a short stretch where the runoff flows out of a gutter and into a drain that (presumably) runs to the sewer.  By this time, the temperatures had been in the teens for about five days, and the most of the water froze along the ground.  The gutter was encased in ice.

When I looked down, the water flowing over the ice and down the drain reminded me of the first dream I ever recalled.  I think I was about four, or maybe three at the time; but a potent sense of dream deja-vu hit me all the same.

In the dream, I'm floating over an icy river that is flowing between snowy banks.  The sound of flowing water is the only sound.  Sometimes I recall that one bank was green and summery.  But the water flows into an icy cave.  Everything by then is in Wintery black-and-white, and the water becomes rapids funneling into an ice-rhimed whirlpool.  I am not sure if I was floating in the water, or hovering above it -- the dream has a disembodied feel to it.  In any case, my four-year-old self did not want to go further into the swirly, icy, darkness, and that's pretty much where the dream ends.

At least it wasn't the reoccuring, never-ending countdown nightmare (no images, just one voice counting down from a random start with random intervals until a second voice yelled "ZERO!" and there'd be a sound like a piano smashing from a great height, accompanied by the knowledge that Something Horrible had happened, -- and then the countdown would start again, and again, and again...)  I used to have until I was about eight (whew).