It had been one of those days, the kind where you wake up dreaming and never fall back asleep.
After smoking El Skunko brand cigars during my last two trout dreams, today’s agenda was Serious Business 101. No bullshit. Get it on, get it off, and get it over with. I was focused like a cheaply shot wedding photograph and it showed.
I dreamed I woke up at 4:08AM and -- groggily -- threw on my fishing clothes; next thing I know, I’m dreaming that it’s 5:03AM and I’m hiking streamside, my vision aided somewhat by my headlamp. My dream looked a little like this, sort of gun-metal blue mixed with Navy black:
Still apparently dreaming (I couldn’t tell), I humped it – emphasis on hump – along the stream; as sometimes happens in dreams, I floated above-ground for long distances with little or no effort. Looking down, I could see plants and birds and rocks and things rush by a few feet below while I followed John Lennon's excellent advice: relax and let your mind float downstream.
Try it sometime, you'll like it; maybe one day you, too, will surrender to the void.
As I floated back to earth, I started bouncing, rubber ball-style, from boulder to flat and back to boulder again, deliberately bypassing what I knew were decent, consistently producing waters, all because of the memory of the Money Hole. The Money Hole was the place where my evil spin-fishing twin threw a Rapala during a previous dream and latched onto something considerable, something, ahem, of size.
That memory – solitary and utterly unadorned -- propelled me along in my purple-haze morning dream; I executed a series of back-flips in mid-air due to the complete lack of gravity. "Imagine how far I'll be able cast," I belly-laughed, the sound bouncing off of the cliffs above as if they, too, were laughing.
Time can either fly or crawl in dreams; this morning, it was flying. At the hour of 5:43AM, there I was, looking at it, ass-deep in it, smelling the sky, feeling the water boiling in my blood -- the Money Hole:
Weird how streams can look purple-pink in dreams, isn't it?
Still fast asleep, I rigged up silently, quickly, watching for signs of wildlife around me in the rapidly lightening sky. I tied on something so weird, so ridiculous, that, in the dream, I had a sub-dream wherein a friend of mine laughed at the fly -- then at me – before he morphed into a streamside cottonwood. I laughed right back at him (it felt weird laughing at a cottonwood, as much as I love those grand old trees) and tossed some line into the plastic air, out onto the water. My backcast stretched for m-i-l-e-s in the weightless environment of the dream. I re-awoke, suddenly back in the first dream, and made what I’d call a textbook streamer retrieve (it was difficult keeping the streamer underwater; the lack of gravity was starting to get annoying). Regardless, I had so much fun I did it again and soon found myself grappling with this gnarly son of a bitch:
Not exactly the monster two-by-four of my realities, but, heck, for a dream, she was everything I needed.
Suddenly the dream was all about streamers: olive bead head wooly buggers, purple bead head wooly buggers (those Prince-purple babies didn’t draw so much as a follow), and some other weird streamer-thingie, one I’m sworn to secrecy about (sheesh, my fly-tying friends are so weird). It was like radio station KSTR: All Streamers, All The Time. “I like streamers, ‘cause streamers can make you mine”. The radio station was playing a song whose name escaped me, by a hot new band called Royal Wulff and His Drag Free Drifts. Small fish floated in and out of my conscious mind:
No size queen, me -- they’re ALL dreamy.
Then I started to wake up, but quickly fell back asleep; I resumed dreaming about fishing a shallow riffle -- in fact, it was the riffle at the head of the Money Pool. It was sure a pretty little riffle, and so I cast (again, for miles and miles), retrieved, cast, retrieved -- still in a dream-state (California?)-- and had my patience rewarded thusly:
In dream inches, this fish measured at least thirty, maybe thirty-five. She sure was fat, and she sure was strong – I can still feel her taut body writhing against my grip: confident, powerful, alive with the spirit of wildness -- and she sure looked mad at me when she swam off into the depths of the stream, hopefully a little stronger, a little wiser, a little sadder, a little madder, someone get her a ladder.
And so my dream morning progressed, cumulating in a total of a dozen or so fine, finned fish brought to net, bookended by one feisty resident who played me like an air hockey game – I was the puck – and lost me in a sea of orange-purple algae, and another goofy trout who went ballistic and jumped about eight feet out of the water (dream feet, that is; in reality she really probably only jumped about a foot) and simply floated away into the lime-scented sunlight.
I missed ‘em both –- the dream suddenly turned nightmare.
Even so, it was one of the best dreams I’ve ever had; then I woke up and all I got was this stupid blog.
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