I found the first bangles in a dream.  We’d been climbing a steep volcanic mountain, and as we got back down below the snow layer the white melted out into a field of slippery silver bangles.  They had a kind of strange magnetism and as I got down to collect them they would fling away at high speed and land with a tinkle at some distance.  After a while I realized that the more I tried to collect them the more the ground cleared away to the black lava field underneath and in the end… frustration.  It’s not the first dream of frustration felt.  But I did not wake up in frustration but walking, some of the bangles caught on my foot and I managed to collect a few.  After waking I struggled to remember what happened next. I’d no idea what to do with the bangles  I had in my hand, so I’d thrown them  in a drawer in my desk, where all other travel collectibles are. I had no idea who I’d been climbing with either.  She’d been there climbing too but seemingly not interested in the bangles but wanted to get into the white zone at the top of the mountain. Did she come down ? No idea ? but I know when I woke I was in my room in my hotel nowhere near snow and out in the outback, far from any mountain.  But I opened the drawer and there they were, the bangles.

She’d been dreaming of riding a wild brumby in the snow country down through the rafts of snowgums, down to the creek.  The snow gums white trunks flashed by. The trees parted as the horse charged through them, shifting aside and springing back in time with the gallop. But then she felt as though falling and the ground rising up to become snow and white and cool.

As I got dressed I saw that the hotel had some prints of the snow country on the wall.  Memories of Clancy of the Overflow perhaps.  Hotel decor was low cost and somewhat stereotyped.   I imagined that all other rooms in the hotel had similar prints.  I opened the door and the light from my room streamed into the darkened corridor.

“What are you doing here ?” I asked on leaving my room.  There in the darkened cool corridor was a woman wearing the bangles I’d put in my drawer.

“What are you doing here ?” She asked with some affront. She looked past me into my room and her expression changed.  I turned around and saw she’d been looking at the print on the wall.  The one with the horses and snowgums.

“I’ve opened the door on my dream reality of bangles” I said.

“That’s funny – there is my brumby dream on your wall” She said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Courtesy Tersiiska / Flickr / Bangles

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