I Dreamed I Didn’t Drown

Here’s the third dream of the set–no real point to it, but it has an interesting feature to it.

So, I dreamed that on some patriotic  holiday we stopped at some kind of expansive roadside rest stop or roadside attraction.  It had a swimming feature so we splashed around for a bit and then we decided to go to the bathroom before we left.  this was a big place, so they had several small bathroom buildings all together, laid out roughly in the over all shape of the US, and each bathroom building was labeled by a region.  There was a small access road to the left running diagonally up and away, and across it there was another small building that represented the Northwest broadly speaking, and there was a little sign saying something about the geographic center of the United States being represented by this building.*  We were feeling patriotic so we decided to go there for our bathroom break, though my son kept saying ‘it’s a small lake, it’s some kind of small lake.’  There was a little group of us waiting to go in until the current group had cleared the building, which I thought was odd for a bathroom.

When we went inside, it was not a bathroom, nor was it exactly a small lake.  It was a mid-sized room with a floor of rough concrete like you see around swimming pools.  The floor was a bit wet.  There was a hole in the floor, just a few feet across, that was full of water.  Someone there said that the hole went down down down farther than anyone knew and it was there for anyone who wanted to jump in.  This young girl did, went down under, came up grinning, and got out.

Well, I was feeling patriotic, so of course I was not gonna miss the opportunity to jump into this watering hold that represented the geographic center of the United States, plus I was already in swim trunks.

So I was the next person to jump in.

I went down pretty far, more than I thought I would.  The hole was a tube and it had lighting strips as far down as I was and as far down as I could see.  I drifted further down for a bit and then decided I needed to swim back up.  I started swimming and kept swimming and started to get a little concerned about how long it was taking, and then I checked my lungs and I felt fine but I was still getting more nervous so I started to really lunge out with my arms and really push down hard on the return stroke, and then I noticed that I was hurting for air and breathing in, but the breathing was fine, it was air not water, so I got even more concerned and frankly started to panic, and in my panic I took another huge lungful of air, and this scared me so  much that I woke up and discovered the reason I was breathing air instead of water was I was lying in my bed.

*In the dream, I had the vague idea that the geographic center was somewhere in Wyoming if you include Alaska and Hawaii.  Looking it up, its in South Dakota