I was wholly aware of myself inside the dream, knew it was a dream. This is not unusual for lucid dreaming. What is unusual, at least for me, is that I didn’t tweak the direction of the dream. Often, I lucid dream to tamp down anxiety.

This was not that kind of dream.

It was like a play. A simple theater, outside, perhaps in a public park. People playing outside. On its stage, there were several adults in a class facing an instructor leaning against a dais.

It was a maker’s class. The assignment: to create a vessel to carry water.

A forest green hand pump rose neatly through the planks of the outdoor stage, front and center, as if the structure were built precisely to honor the fixture. It was such as you would find in any state park.

I knew from experience it would take twenty pulls to fill a bucket, its water smelling of minerals, about ten percent of it a sloppy overspray on your shoes if you got too close.

Birds talked to us from within the condominium of space of a nearby mother cedar as we crafted our conveyances. The rat-a-tat-tat of a pileated woodpecker somewhere made me wonder who was knocking on my front door. None of us could escape the smell of sharp cedar and blackberry blossom and fine August dust all around us. None of us wanted to.

The majority of the people in the class shaped their vessels as large globes: clear and rigid forms. Some had even taken to decorating their vessels with regional icons: Mt. Rainier, Sasquatch, sword fern fiddlehead, coffee cup, ferry boat, rainbow trout. Others hadn’t until, per bystander effect, they did, inspired by their peers to add touches of themselves with China markers or band stickers or belts of daisy chains. One floated feathers and pinecones inside, spoke of finding candles, and that was good, really good.

But one person did not interpret the assignment in the same way. A man, middle aged, white, wearing a baseball cap. He crafted what looked more like a tray, flat and long, the size of a twin bed, of thin plastic inflated, a floating mat with sides, like a very shallow coffin. There were no decorations on its sides owing to its design: no space for applying decals or inscribing pictures. He, like all the others, filled up this rectangular vessel with water, the length of it sprawled across the stage, commanding the space previously held by two of his peers, who had to step off, displaced, to give him room. It took close to eighty pulls to complete the task.

Then the instructor asked us to carry our vessels to a section of the learning space under a nearby mother cedar.

So we did the thing: we picked up what basically looked like fishbowls without fish and carried them to the area the instructor indicated. Except for the man with the flat vessel. He struggled to pick up his container; it was too heavy, unwieldy, the water kept sloshing out, and he became frustrated.

When the others saw his frustration, they could have just ignored him, they could have just waited and watched and let him sink into his own humiliation. Instead, they, without a word to one another, not even a glance, as a single entity moved toward him, each carried a different corner or side and lifted his vessel upon the count of an unheard but understood command.

He stood by, marveling, as they—curious pall bearers, it seemed—cradled his vessel to join the rest of the others, setting it down without a word.

I watched him. He didn’t utter anything, not at first, could scarcely meet the eyes of his classmates, as he shuffled behind to join the rest of us. I could see he didn’t know what to say. That he was trying to think of the right words, his brow coiled, gaze averted to the ground, searching.

I could also see that the rest of the students didn’t want anything from him. It was like they didn’t even see him. He gave not even a thank you, not even a smile. The task was done, and the man just stood there, awestruck.

But just as the instructor took a breath to speak our next task, the man interrupted. He said to me: “Why am I in your dream? You are not supposed to see me. You are not supposed to see me. You are not supposed to see me.”

The sound of the chimes outside my window woke me. I arose, feeling so much like this scene was an answer to a question I had never asked myself out loud. An answer to everything I could have ever worried about in the past, would ever worry about in the future, yet a moment, in the present, devoid of any shred of worry.

Afterward, in the garden, watering the plants, I found the earth flat and round at once. I thought of Persephone, the sky, and the grubs growing beneath the soil.

Tamara Kaye Sellman is author of Intention Tremor: A Hybrid Collection (2021; MoonPath Press). Aqueduct Press will publish her forthcoming short story collection in their Conversation Pieces series in 2024-25. Recent appearances include Cirque, Turtle Island Quarterly, Verse Daily, MS Focus, and Seattle’s Local Sightings Film Festival. Tamara’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize or earned other awards. She is currently at work on two speculative novels, a Pacific Northwest gothic speculative poetry collection, and a series of experimental poetry films.