The time I drowned

This dream felt so much like memory that I woke up re-evaluating my beliefs on past lives.

I dreamed that I was a fifteen-year-old girl living with my father and grandmother (who were the same as my father and grandmother in this life) in a small wooden house in a forest on a river. It was a gloomy, depressing place, all drooping trees and rotting wood and sticky mud, and, then as now, my family seemed obsessed with keeping the dim, dirty past alive with dusty old pictures and books about virtuous girls who died young.

There is a rickety dock behind our house, and it's one of my household duties to wait on it every evening for my father to come home and help him tie up his boat. Sometimes I beg my family not to make me stand down on the dock at sunset, and I always do the chore sulkily, but it makes no difference; my father needs help tying up the boat, and my grandmother's too old. This duty is the most hated thing in my life, because I am afraid of the river. In the daylight it's not so bad, but as the sun goes down, things appear on the water that were not there in the light.

Every night when the shadows lengthen, a boat like my father's appears out of nowhere, just sitting on the water near the opposite bank, absolutely still regardless of wind or current, and the man in this boat simply stares at me and leers. He never moves nor makes a sound, but he is always there when the sun goes down. And some nights whispering voices can be heard, and when I look around, I see a man and woman standing on the bank near me, or worse, walking through the water towards me. I know none of these are of this world, and I know equally well that they want me. They make my skin creep like spiders in my bedclothes.

One night there is a storm blowing, and I fight long and hard with my grandmother to let me forgo my duty down at the dock. It is already eerily dark out because of the clouds. I beg and whine and threaten, but finally my grandmother shouts me down and calls me names and tells me that if my father drowns trying to dock his boat, it will be all my fault and so will the abject poverty that will follow his loss. She hands me a lantern, shoves me out the door, and slams it in my face. I walk down to the dock wailing in anger and fear.

The creepy little boat and it's leering occupant are already there when I assume my post, sitting perfectly still in the water while waves rage all around. Groaning voices are in the air, and the ghostly couple are already out in the water up to their shoulders, reaching toward me. I can't see my father's boat anywhere, and there's no way of knowing when he will arrive home. The dock pitches under me as I stand there crying in terror, and I cling to a rotten post for support. I look up to the house, but it looks so far away and closed to me, offering no safety. When I look back at the river, the ghostly couple are right there, their hands on the edge of the platform, their mouths hanging open. When the waves lift the dock, they heave at it, seeming to laugh at my fear. Tree branches whip back and forth as the wind intensifies, and finally, after a number of tries at it, the waves and the ghostly hands manage to tear the dock away and flip me into the water. I hold on to one side of the loose dock, trying to keep my limbs away from the wraiths that are in the water with me, just a few feet away. There is an iron hook on the dock that has come loose from the ring that holds it to the supporting posts, and I brace myself as well as I can against the muddy bottom and try to bring the two together again. I come tantalyzingly close a few times, but the waves are too strong. I keep losing my grip on the solid post, and losing track of which way is up and home, and which way is the rushing river. Exhaustion finally overtakes me, and I slip under the surface. The last thing I see is the dock over my head, cutting me off from the air.