I'm with a group of people stranded on an island. There are sort of strange but not threatening-seeming people there, who probably explain that the ferry can't return right away. We bide our time, making temporary relationships, temporary routines, playing, waiting.
We gradually become more watched and more constrained by our drone-like 'guides'- whatever and whoever they are.
Then things change. Too much time has passed. Our captors continue to play sweet, but it's an obvious sham, and they start breaking the masquerade with bursts of cruelty. I think a horrifying episode occurs in which they make a spectacle of killing a bunch of us.
Now this is grim and concentration-camp-like. How can we hold on to hope, and believe in a chance that we'll survive? We still have freedom to move around and talk, but we're never far from surveillance and destruction.
One day we're herded into an underground prison. They're calling it something else- sickeningly half-assed propaganda- but we know this is the worst yet.
Seeing a last opportunity, one person breaks off and I accompany him into a woody strip between the dirty stucco building nd the shore, where cold waves are breaking under the moonlight. We haven't been discovered, or they're giving us a grace period. Time is of the essence... I am following him, and an amazing revelation is dawning on him, that has to be proved.
The revelation is that the trap we're in is too perfect, too suddenly binding, to be real. In putting his mind to not believing the apparent island-captivity reality, he feels a confidence rising that he's going to be able to see a crack in the false front and a way out. He steps into the water, and this is it: the ocean itself is not real. It was there all along- we could have walked away anytime, as he's doing, step by gingerly step, through the ceramic tiles of ocean, now coming to the deeper-colored sections...
Now I reflect on this illusion of a threat, and on the very real suffering the people are still going through in the face of this threat that is just an illusion. I picture a woman weeping on the railing above the boulder beach, and the whispered conversations on what to do and what this means, between former strangers, in front of the "restless sea."
Obviously this is like the Truman Show, but violent, or Survivor, with higher stakes...
In fact, during the dream it occurred to me that this wasn't my dream but a familiar story from a movie, that I thought was called "On the Beach." At that point I was a bit more distant from and in control of the dream...
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