Dream: The Great Harp of Time

Dream 20020915, 6:00 AM:

I’m talking to a woman about taking care of her kids. It seems like I have somehow gotten stuck with the job, and I’m not very excited about it. There are two kids, a boy and a girl. They are going to be staying with me, and it seems like the woman is their grandmother. She has made all the arrangements already, without asking me. I have a double bed set up for them in the same room as my queen-sized bed, and she tells me that it’s my responsibility to tell them that the smaller bed is theirs. She says it like she thinks I should be sleeping in the smaller bed, since there are two of them. I go into the bedroom, and find that both the beds are full of little eggs – my bed is full of turtle eggs, but very little ones; their bed is full of some other kind of eggs, I think they’re snails. I pick up one of the turtle eggs, and I can see the turtle inside wiggling; the egg is translucent. The kids are here with me, and we’re talking about the eggs in the beds. It seems like we’re supposed to keep them warm by sleeping in the beds.

Then, I’m in a neat building, it seems like it is underground, with no windows showing outside. There is a meeting of the guardians of time, and there is a man who seems like he’s the Devil or some similar trickster character, and he’s trying to get me to play some song on this huge beautiful musical instrument. The song would end time, or change history in some huge way. The guardians are people of several different cultures. The chief person there is an old woman with white hair; she seems to come from some place in the middle South, with a stong hillbilly accent. It seems ironic that she would be the leader, because she seems so unsophisticated. She begins to talk, as if she’s opening a formal meeting.

As she talks, I’m leafing through a book that appears to be a history of breadmakers. It has pictures of statuary and things devoted to the various breadmakers, and a lot of the artwork is really beautiful. One statue is listed as being made of sterling silver pewter; it has a cool silver peacock in it that I look at for a while.

I have to go to the bathroom, and I get up quietly and go to the hallway, looking for it. I can’t find a sign for it, and I ask a little kid who’s walking in the hallway. He points me to a door, but there is a group of people waiting in front of it, so I keep looking for another one.

I go back to the place where the meeting was. It seems like the guardians are gone now, and the devil-man has opened up the instrument. It opens from the center to the sides, like a tryptich. It has rows of strings, sort of like a harp or a piano opened up, and also a keyboard. He tells me that it can play any song in the world, including the songs of great power. I don’t know why he wants me to make it play this song, or why I’m involved in the first place. I know that if it plays the song, history will be totally changed. It seems like it’s almost inevitable, or like it’s something I have to do.