A dream - alien mountain

A dream - alien landscape

I was on an alien planet, climbing a mountain to get a better view of the sunrise. Always wanting to be up higher, for a better view. That's me in real awake time. I never have a good view of the beautiful things.

I was climbing this alien mountain, and I could see the edge of the sky just beyond the summit brightening into this purplish-green color, and the bottoms of the clouds were just starting to light up in a strange, un-red cast. Totally alien. Seeing these things, I started panicking and scrambling to get to the top, because I thought that I was missing it.

When I finally reached the summit, I was just in time. Geez... how to describe a dream imagery that's so breathtakingly beautiful... no, that's an inferior couple of words. I'll have to use an unorthodox word to describe it, because it's simply indescribable, the beauty of it. It was deathly beautiful.

The details were like this... dang. Oh man. See, what I'm about to attempt to describe, it'll be like... like, or as if... it's like what I'm trying to relate, from my mind to yours, the memory of it... my attempt to describe that memory will be just a crude pencil sketch copy of God's final masterpiece.

But I'm compelled to try. The details were like this... I stood on a mountaintop of an alien world, and the first thing I did was to look down. Fog banks of snow rippled and rolled down the opposite side of the mountain, cast into sharp relief by the low morning light of the alien sun. These were like furrows of fog, but made of clouds of snow instead of water vapour. These banked furrows of snow-fog began to move lazily down into the valley as the morning heat nudged them out of their frozen and suspended state, and into languid motion.

With some effort I pulled my eyes upward and to my utter astonishment I saw, dominating at least a third of the far horizon and cast into a bluish haze with distance, this indescribably huge thing thrusting upward, as if a part of the planet had been peeled back and purposefully shaped into this mind-bogglingly enormous mountain. It was as if the planet had been run through with God's own spear, but instead of piercing all the way through, had instead pushed the land upward, forming this unnaturally steep escarpment with a peak so tall that it punched through the top of the atmosphere and projected into space. The alien sun was emerging from just behind the peak as I watched, and the light was reflecting off of my mountain and Illuminating the face of the distant one.

Intricate shapes cascaded down the sides of this far mountain; incredibly detailed patterns of colors and shadows that described vegetation and rocks and cliffs and stream runoffs and icy ledges, and all of it was cast into sharp relief. Everywhere there were different colors and shapes and patterns. Twisting around and through and following the lines of these patterns were bright banks of snow that reflected the light of morning. And as I looked upward and toward the summit, the Star was making its appearance, and it was as if the peak of the mountain had merged with an intolerably bright crown of orange fire, and runnels of it were streaming downward in rivers of molten gold.

It was so heart wrenchingly beautiful that I fell to my knees and looked away from it because I couldn't stand it.  As I looked down, I saw my brother Matt, climbing up the same way that I had come. "Hurry up, Matt, you have to see it before it disappears, hurry up, hurry up!"

When Matt reach the summit, we both turned to take in the view. But we were back on Earth, in a regular valley, by a regular lake, during a regular day. I was so disappointed that I wanted to cry. I was sure that there would never, ever be anything so beautiful on Earth.

Oh, but how I was wrong. My brother and I began walking along the edge of the lake, and as we turned a corner of the valley, we were poleaxed by a view that rivaled the alien planet. A vast mountainscape, containing all of the colors of the Earth, and the purest, bluest sky surrounding it, with the sun shining down and Illuminating rows and rows of fog banks on the distant side of the lake, and those fog banks were rolling, too. They hovered above the surface of the water, creating a sharp delineation between the darkened, bluish undersides and their shining, silver top surfaces, and they rolled languidly, furrows of them, like the alien snow fog, and it was just as spectacular, just as spectacular.