I am with Camilla & Mary-Catherine A. in a grassy park, the 3 of us talking about artist grants applications while standing beside some monkey bars, but soon I get bored & leave.

To pass the time, I take hold of a long rope & start swinging in wide horizontal circles above the park; big circles, high over the ground; almost 100 feet high. Basically I’m flying. To avoid hitting treetops in my circular path I pull myself in on the rope, then release the slack again & swing back out. This goes on for a long time. It’s exciting, but also scary. The rope is attached to something in the center of the park—what thing, I don’t know—but now I can feel that it’s started to wind itself around that central thing, like a game of tether ball, & my circles are getting smaller & smaller. I’m also getting closer & closer to the ground as I spin toward the center, so there are more obstacles to avoid—swingsets & branches & whatnot. I spin faster & faster as the circle spirals inward & I barely keep control—barely miss the trees, get scratched up, because I don’t have time to see them coming. I get dizzy, going faster & faster, until finally I find myself spinning in an upright circle on the ground like a whirling Dervish, rope-less.

Then the park dream-morphs into a body of water. A tide, or some kind of tidal wave, has come in & flooded the park with seawater. It’s deep & I have to tread water. I look around to find my friends & see them sitting on a pier, close to where the monkey bars had been. They’ve put bathing suits on & look like they’re about to go swimming. I swim to them, to the pier, which feels very far away now. When I finally get there I am out of breath & slightly annoyed with Camilla for not being worried about me. I pull myself out of the water. I realize that I left my coat & shoes on the ground, in the park, when it WAS a park, & now they’re lost under the water, & that annoys me too.

Then I see a little boy under the surface of water, & he’s not coming up. Thinking that he’ll drown, or get eaten by a shark (or a small, blurry, sea-monster-thing existing in my mind’s eye) I dive in to save him. But once I’m underwater, I can’t see him, & by the time I get back up to the surface the boy is already safe; pulled onto the pier by his father who’d simply extended his hand to his kid & isn’t even wet. I have overreacted. The kid is fine & was never in danger. Camilla & Mary-Catherine think I’m silly. I feel embarrassed, & generally bummed that the park has turned into a body of water, since everything that’s happened since then has been so shitty.