Just a dream / Protection

Such a strange dream.

I was in a foreign country, with a family that I didn't know. We came across a boy in a shop selling rattan chairs and baskets and wooden statues of lions with chipped green and red paint. The boy and I locked eyes and started running, faster and faster, and we came to a place where the earth dropped away into a waterfall, and we raced down that waterfall, jumping from one rock to another, and then ran back and raced down again for the sheer joy of the competition and the tumble.

Then we sat at the base of the waterfall, and he told me about how he wanted to be a fighter pilot, and join the army. 'And everyone knows World War III is just about to happen,' he said, 'and I know that there will be so many people I kill.'

Then a baby was brought up (we were suddenly at the base of the West Road Concert Hall stage, and not a waterfall) and I knew that the baby was going to die, and all I wanted to do was protect it. But I also knew that it needed to die, because it would be reborn and give everyone hope. But the boy beside me didn't know that, and didn't understand how I could sing even when they carried the dead baby away. Then he told me, 'What really scares me is that I don't know if a part of me wants to kill those people.' And all the protection I'd felt toward that baby shifted with sudden force onto the boy, so young and so aware of mortality.

The silly buckets on the deck, 
That had so long remained, 
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;                                      This is the way the world ends
And when I awoke, it rained.                         not with a bang but a whimper. (The Hollow Men)

My lips were wet, my throat was cold, 
My garments all were dank; 
Sure I had drunken in my dreams, 
And still my body drank. (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)