this and that

i)
I remember this dream. How can I not when it comes to remind me again and again like a flashing scene from a projector that has finally given up its mundane job and would no longer be persuaded to continue.
Always the same place, the same window with the vertical steel bars that I look out from, to an immense and expansive field of wild grass that is blue and misty-green and suspended above it, the skies of the most magnificent and shocking electric blue. I always wake up and smile at this returning dream that has reached a status of becoming almost a friend and I never fail to wonder if its a remnant of another life long ago or a wondrous scene of a painting that perhaps I had seen once in my life that my subconscious mind kept carefully locked away and that it could never quite allow me to forget.

ii)
There was a huge flame of the forest tree in that field long ago. It must have been at least a hundred years old, its girth around 20 times the width of my small frame when I was no more than eight. Some days, as children, we forget to stand still and be awed by its size, our small palms brushing and grazing its roughened skin while we run around it, giggling wildly as we try to see who can outrun the rest, careful not to trip over the knee-high roots in the process. Round and round we run until its no longer clear who is in front of whom and our sides ache from laughing too much and too loud.