It all started in the safe and familiar territory of the everyday. There were three of us, walking through the known surroundings of my territory: an old mentor, M., and myself. Our mission was to search for something specific—an objective that the dream’s logic conveniently erased from my memory upon awakening. However, what we found was an anomaly embedded in the middle of the urban landscape.
On the corner, sharing space with the usual commerce, the sidewalk and asphalt had given way to an impossible geological formation. It was a natural thermal spring, brutalist and mystical, identical to the steaming calderas found in frigid fantasy landscapes. Surrounded by large blocks of rustic stone, the hot water exhaled a dense vapor that created an isolated and hypnotic sanctuary in the middle of the street. My mentor parked in an atypical way, a maneuver whose motives were also lost in the fog of the subconscious, and we decided to enter.
The Boundary Collapse and the Ancestral Event
The exact moment my body touched that hot water, the boundary of reality collapsed.
I was suddenly transported to an alternate dimension, a vast space hosting what I understood to be a grand gathering of the Ancient Lineage. The single caldera on the corner had multiplied into several impressive thermal springs, arranged at different altitudes, forming sequential steps like true levels of progression.
The atmosphere of the place was dense and sacred. The experience of being in those waters was a surreal amalgam: it carried the deep, visceral introspection of a consciousness-expansion ritual, the contemplative and transformative melancholy of a point-of-no-return crossing, and the lethal weight of a catharsis. We were diving, literally and figuratively, into emotional depths and the histories of past generations.
During the rite, the water level began to rise massively. The change in the environment was drastic, but looking around, I saw that the matriarchal entities remained absolutely whole. They inhabited that space with an ancestral naturalness, breathing and existing amidst the flood as if the water were an extension of their own bodies, perfectly serene in the face of the immensity swallowing us.
The Colossal Sphere and Asphyxiation
For me, what began as a revelatory immersion quickly converted into a trap.
Suddenly, I realized there was no longer a surface. In my oneiric perception, the environment had enclosed itself into a colossal sphere of hot liquid, and I was trapped in its center. The air failed me. The panic of not being able to breathe took over my body, shattering the peace of the ritual.
My only instinctive reaction was to try swimming frantically in search of a way out, an air pocket, any rupture in that liquid prison. But it was useless. The physics of that place played against me: the more I struggled and swam toward a nonexistent surface, the faster my oxygen limit was consumed.
I was sinking into the very environment in which they floated with ease. The fact that I drowned repeatedly, transitioning between these multiple steps without being able to decipher exactly what the immersion required of me, transformed the initial reverence into a suffocating terror.
I woke up with a heavy chest, pulling the air from my own room, still haunted by the image of those deep waters and the unshakable peace of those who were born already knowing how to breathe within them.