The Best Dream I Ever Had

     The best dream I ever had was a fairly short one, story-wise, but I remember every detail like it actually happened to me, and just last year. I had the dream, in fact, something like 17 years ago.
I was part of an exploratory expedition. I was some sort of survey expert in some form of biological field sciences. I lack the specifics; you know how dreams are. As our ship set down – a comically classic scifi-style silver cone of a rocket ship, three fins and ladder to the ground and everything – some of the crew started setting up a base camp, unloading crates and so on, in the circle the ship had blasted into the ground cover while landing.
     I stood on the edge of the cleared area looking outward. It was a sort of heath-type landscape, lots of low ground cover on rolling hills, and as I looked outward I saw that it rather quickly grew over into shrubby, hilly grasslands, with the edges of a forest visible in the distance. I felt drawn, as toward the smell of vanilla or baking cookies. I felt enticed by the wide landscape. I felt that… there was something out there.
     At that moment, a little dog, suspiciously (in retrospect) similar to a certain Cairn Terrier named Toto, which belonged to a member of the crew, came running out of the ship and looked up at me. I could see the open happy question in his little face and so I said to him, in affirmation, “Let’s go!”
     We started running. Every step I took made me feel more free than the last, and the little dog was barking in joy, bounding from tussock to hillock to dune. And then I felt.. them. I felt the people who lived there, I felt the whole species. My telepathic impression was that they were at least vaguely humanoid in shape, and large – very large – and black, and not particularly solid in form. They were in the forest, all through it, and they were watching us. And they were love.
These people were so glad we were there – because they were love, because we were love, because all things are love. Their welcome, their joy at the discovery of us, their message of inclusion was overwhelming. The telepathic bond was easy and open and so far beyond beautiful I don’t know the words. Everything, finally, was… all right. Always had been, always would be. Comfortable, unbroken, explicable, beautiful. Everything. Always.
     I knew that they understood our failings as a species, our ambitious grasping monkey need to control before we understand, our dangerous loneliness, our beauty. And we were welcomed in joy. Nothing mattered, nothing about anything mattered, because of the love. The very atmosphere was love. The plants were love, the creatures that ate them were love and consumed them in love, while loved for it; their predators in turn acted out of the joy and completion that is things as they should be. Although I could feel my rational concerns about what my people might do to theirs, what corruptions could be unleashed, what horrors could go down – none of that mattered. They could see these things too, and they loved me for caring. And further, they could see me as nothing, even myself, ever had before, and by extension all of my possibilities and meanings. And it was all right – because nothing, ever, is not all right, when things are unfolding as they do. We were outside that kind of meaning now.
     So I ran. I and that dog ran, leaping and laughing and barking and yelling, into the wide plains of grass, feeling them waiting among the trees with metaphorically open arms to welcome my species home. And as I ran I shouted, “I love this place! I loooooooove this plaaaaaaaaaace!”
     

     And that’s it. That’s the best dream I ever had. I woke up bathed in, swaddled by, infused with that sense of overwhelming rightness and love and joy, and the sensation of running in pure freedom. I’ve never really lost it again. I lose track of it sometimes, but then I remember that dream, I remember touching that place, and I can feel it again, steeping in the depths of my soul, and I shrug off the despairs of the day and go on.

* From my brain, obviously.