Saturday 18 November 2023

Dream recall from overnight:

I was in a sandy desert-like place, with low undulating hills stretching out to the horizon. I was surveying with a helper, and we were putting wooden stakes into the sand as we were laying out a road. I knew I was back in time because the surveying instrument looked like this:

As we moved along, we came up to the edge of a vast, open cavern. It was so deep that I had vertigo looking down into it, so I lay down on the sand, peering over the edge at the sight. Hundreds of feet below, there was a hard-packed road, stretching off into deep tunnels at either end of the open rift. It was not paved, but solid and smooth, with people and vehicles moving in either direction, as far as I could see.

We went back to our surveying work and realized that we would need many more wooden stakes. At the supply yard, we were told specifically to stay away from the ‘good’ lumber and only use boards from the rough-cut pile. After cutting a large stack, we moved back out onto the sandy desert and continued to survey and stake out the road. We moved slowly over the hilly, sandy terrain. It was very quiet, the only sounds were our occasional shouts back and forth, and the hammering of the wooden stakes.

The path we were laying out led to a wooden trestle bridge which stretched over a ravine, but it was also a railroad bridge, and we couldn’t walk across it. I had to clamber down the ravine into a swampy, marshy area in order to get past the bridge and ravine. The dream faded as I was looking through the transit optic at the long line of wooden markers, stretching out over the sandy hills and curving out of sight.