Dreamtime Dreamscape: Dioramas and Golden Woods

Last night I had a dream about a diorama, a cabin in the woods, a shopping center, and the basement of the house I grew up in.

It was a strange dream, where I flitted between locations faster than I can keep track.

The parts I remember...

I was in a grocery store, only all the shelves were made out of logs, like in a tourist store for some national park. I was going down the wood aisles, looking at food. I turned a corner and saw some diorama's made out of different kinds of wood. They all showed scenes of the mountains.

The first was a little small, of a cabin in a valley. It had a fountain/stream in it, making a little water wheel turn.

I went onto the second and was suddenly in the basement of my old house as it was when I grew up, with the pine wood slats on the walls. People were there. The room also looked like one of the rooms from the nature center where my mother worked when I was really little. It was built like a cabin, with large logs for walls, everything stained golden brown. There were teachers there too, I think?

The room was dominated by a huge diorama of the mountainside. The mountain was carved out of a singular piece of a deep golden color wood. There was another cabin on the mountainside, made out of green wood. A river ran down the side of the mountain, made with clear acrylic. I wondered why the water wasn't made to be a fountain like in the other diorama.

I got close to the diorama and suddenly I was walking up the side of the mountain. The way was difficult, it was steep. The path was a gravel road that I sometimes had to climb on hands and knees. The gravel bit into my hands painfully.

I saw the cabin. It was a one story cabin, stained with a light color. It practically shone, it was so heavily stained. I wondered why the diorama had the colors wrong, the cabin was golden and the mountain was green. I zoomed out of the diorama and the colors switched, then zoomed back into it.

There was a precipice near the cabin where the stream tumbled down. At the stream's head I could look over a cliff to see down the entire mountain and see the water tumbling below me. I longed to jump off the cliff into the water but I knew it would be too shallow.

I turned to go back to the cabin, but I also nudged the diorama with my hip and the entire thing shifted and tumbled to the floor. The wood was suddenly nothing more than a blanket covering a rough brick frame. I fell both inside the diorama and in the room where it was displayed.

The people in the room all were glaring at me, muttering things under their breath about my clumsiness. Their stares bore into my back and I began sweating terribly.

Desperate, I tried to put the blanket back in place, but I couldn't get the stream to line up. The stream, I knew, was the key. If I got the stream where it had to go, the diorama would turn back into wood and my body stuck inside the diorama would be fine. If not, something terrible would happen.

I kept climbing up the bricks of the diorama, carrying the blanket behind me. I kept slipping and falling because every time my body inside the diorama fell over, I did in the display room as well.

At some point I woke up. The blanket turned into tough wool cloth and it scratched at my hands. I woke up not knowing if I got the stream back where it should be, but I knew I was about to jump off the cliff if I didn't.

It was a bizarre dream, I'm still not sure what the point of it all was or the reason for my frantic behavior at the end.