Lost in Translation?

In my dream, I find myself in a large sporting goods store. It is connected, at its far end, to a shopping mall but I’m well past that now. Instead, I am deep within the store about to wander among the many rows of white shelving.

I notice the hanging merchandise displayed for sale. Packages of sinkers, bobbers, snelled hooks. Fishing lures like spinners, plugs, jigs, flies and spoons.

I look up and I realize that the store now has a ceiling forty feet tall. The windows are so immense that it seems as if the walls are made completely of glass.

I can see that the day is overcast and cloudy, except that there is a giant plecostomus catfish on the outside of the glass. It is ten or fifteen feet long and it is hovering in the air with dragonfly wings that beat so fast I can barely see them. It is eating the green algae that covers the outside of the windows. Wherever the fish clears away the algae, beautiful, brilliant blue sky shines through.

This seems wondrous to me, and it makes me happy, like a child. But I am immediately overcome by an inexplicable feeling of dread as I notice that a terrible dark storm is approaching from the far off horizon.

A salesman asks if he can help me but I distrust him. I dash away fearing that the shelves will move by themselves to form a labyrinth that would block my way.

The man disappears and I am standing before a door. It opens by itself, and I take a step outside, and now I am standing on green grass. There is a far-off river valley between high mountains.

The sky darkens and I feel a tremendous sense of loss and emptiness.

The grand, spreading oak tree before me has perfect symmetry and a beautiful woman is standing at its base. She wears a white gown and she radiates a shimmering white light. She has dragonfly wings and I realize in my dream that she must be the same entity that I saw earlier as the plecostomus catfish -- an angel of hope and redemption.

And then I wake up. And I try to figure out, quietly to myself, if the vision of the woman I just saw was actually the character in the movie “Lost in Translation” played by the actress Scarlett Johansson.

You see, it was just the night before that I saw that movie, for the third time.