dream journal

[hudebnik]

I had a dream, based on the terrible short story I wrote forty years ago entitled "The River" (in the form of a multigenerational diary recording the collision of the Indian and Eurasian continental plates), but with a "rent-seeking" trope layered on top: people see an island on the horizon with two enormous trees towering above the rest, and imagine that the fountain of youth (or something similarly mythical and valuable) lies between them. As the island gets closer, they develop more and more elaborate, glowing stories about its wonders, and eventually they go, find a pool there, retrieve some of its water so they can sell it for exorbitant prices, and fall into bickering and bloodshed over the allocation of this new resource.