In Our New, Terrifying World, Dreams Turning Into Nightmares

Solitary beach walking is good for what ails folks.

Predictable tides and the ceaseless slap of waves on the sand offer a reassurance of constancy in a turbulent world.

It offers the walker time to reflect on what already has been and time to dream of what is yet to be.

When I was 10 years old, I walked the surf line of Jacksonville Beach wondering what it would be like to have a strapless bathing suit - just like the older girls who came to the beach with the handsome young soldiers.

A few months later, I walked the same beach wondering why my granddaddy, who made up such beautiful cat stories and shared his sweet, creamy breakfast coffee with me, had had to die. I remember thinking I would be able to see him on his way to heaven if I squinted really hard and looked out to sea.

At 12, I walked Miami’s beaches wondering what it would be like in a new house and a new school. Would I have friends? Would I be smart enough? Pretty enough?

At 16, as I walked I dreamed of Jimmy, my first love, and the way his eyes would dance when he saw me in an icy-blue prom dress with gardenias in my hair.

At 17, I wondered as I walked if there were life after graduation or if all the good stuff was already over.

The beach insisted the best was yet to come and offered comfort and, sometimes, when I needed it, consolation.

There have been many beaches in my life and many walks, but as the years pass, reflection-time begins to whittle away at dream-time.

As I walk the sands of a homely little beach named Folly, just off the coast of Charleston, S.C., I wonder if I can find the long-buried footprints of a year-old boy and his mother who had walked the same shoreline hand in hand. He was learning to talk; she was learning to listen.

Folly’s beaches gave the boy a place to run naked in the sun - to discover when was the best time to look for sand dollars and what was the most humane way to scoop up beached creatures and return them to the warm waters of the Atlantic.

Through the years, I have reminded myself that no matter how ugly life gets, there always will be a beach to walk, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a hand to hold, and then all the ugly things of life will recede with the tide.

But now I’m not so sure.

A terrifyingly different world edged into my dreams last night - a world where people blew up other people, where kindergartens had been turned into armed camps. It was a world with a big hole where something happy used to live.

In the exaggerated slow motion of dreams, I ran for my beach, but a nice woman in a uniform told me to leave, that it was too dangerous on the beach.

She said even the fish were being sluiced away in man-made channels to be “examined and regulated” because it no longer was safe for them to swim in the wild.

There was no beauty anywhere anymore, and the sand dunes had been replaced with steel I-beams. “Safer,” the kind woman said, smiling. “Now, go away.”

A few hollow people lingered behind the barricades, listlessly staring into the empty horizon. They seemed only form - no substance.

But worst of all, children no longer walked the shoreline.

They stood quietly, bearing mute witness to the ugly idea that dreaming is for dummies because only nightmares come true.

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