The Girl With Gray Eyes

On the night of December 19th, 1997, I had the weirdest dream. When I say weird, I mean weird. I have had dreams where I rode a horse in space…. long before Star Wars made it a thing, thank you. I have gone fly fishing off the back of a T Rex and swam with the Fairies that only ate jellybeans.

The dream about Titanic however takes the cake. I dreamed that I was on the ship the night it sank. Now, James Cameron made a life-like movie so the dream should not have been odd. I had had nightmares after watching movies before. What was odd was the fact that I was not in my body during the dream. In my awake state, I was a kid, about 3 ft 4. Maybe 45 lbs. The girl that I was in the dream was easily 20ish-30ish years old, 5ft 8, and maybe 120 lbs. After stumbling around like a drunk giraffe, I gained control over this “giant” body. The first thing I noticed was her skinny hands and long clean fingers with the nails cut short. The next things were obviously the breasts she had that I wasn’t old enough for. The girl was wearing a white wool nightgown, white stockings, and black loafer shoes with silver buckles that resembled the bank symbol. She had a cloak of fabric wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Her hair was braided down her back in a long thick braid that reached down to her backside.

She’s glaring at this metal cagelike gate that you see in the movie to restrain the third-class passengers. You can’t see her face but you feel her/you just death glare this thing. She resumes her pacing in front of this gate and she’s drowning her system with the adrenaline. Her fight or flight reflex has kicked in and she’s tearing to get out of there. You don’t hear any of her thoughts but you can somewhat feel what she’s thinking. “There’s water coming”, “he said to wait here”, “he’s coming right back and you have to be here”, etc.

She just can’t take it anymore and she takes off down the hall. Like myself, she often looks down at her feet while running and I can see her go down a set of stairs which strikes me as odd. Why on Earth would you go down on a sinking ship instead of up? She looks up and around once she clears the last step. Looking to the right, I can see the signs for the Squash Court and Mail Room. She instead takes a left around the cargo hold. There are a hallway and a cluster of cabins down here which they don’t show in the movie. She runs down the hallway until the carpet changes designs. Darting inside one of the cabins, she finally looks up. Inside her cabin are four bunks stacked two on a wall. She crouches down to the bottom right bunk and reaches under. The girl pulls out a leather bag and opens the main compartment. Inside is a wooden box of cherry or cognac stain. She passes the box to her right hand and opens the latch with her left hand. I found this odd because even my left-handed mother does not depend this greatly on her dominant hand. There is no injury to the right hand that I can tell. Inside the box is a bed of emerald green felt and a large, gold heart-shaped lump. It easily fills her palm with its size. I’m assuming it is a locket as it has a clasp on its side. It has a small chain on it. It has three letters engraved into its face like initials in fancy script writing, but two large scratches are crossing them out. I can feel engravings on the back of the locket as it cuts into her fingertips. It makes me think it wasn’t engraved professionally because it wasn’t sanded down properly. She doesn’t flip it over to inspect the writing nor does she open it to view the photos I’m certain are there.

The girl deposits it into the folds of her shawl and I notice the bedspread to her bunk is missing. The other three have a quilt of sorts that matches what I thought was a shawl. I assume she wrapped it around herself to cover her nightgown. She quickly runs from the room. The water is spilling in at an alarming rate and makes it hard to run in so she more or less sloshes through it. Her feet fly down carpet that is drawn in green swirls like the leaves on a spider plant with a black background. She struggling makes her way up a flight of stairs. She’s on the same level as the gate now but she can’t seem to find it again. The girl is shivering from the cold water that has soaked her clothing from the hips down, but the temperature bothers me more than her. Every step she takes, cold water splashes into her shoes and it’s like liquid nitrogen. Freezing, burning cold.

She runs around this deck in a frenzy of panic. The water keeps pouring in from below but this deck( F Deck I believe) is an endless maze of corridors and dead ends. She ends up in the third-class dining saloon. It reeks of linseed oil as she makes her way around the tables and chairs. it’s almost just as much of a maze as the rest of F deck but she has been here before. She never finds her way back to the gate but instead finds a staircase leading upwards. Once she clears the landing, she nearly falls over from exhaustion. I can never hear her thoughts but I can somewhat sense them. She thinks she’s been down here for mere minutes. Her physically exhausted body would beg that it been running for hours. Naturally, I know this cannot be true either. She’s bent over double panting like a dying dog. The railing on the stairs is shaking under her strain.

Her breath comes in gasps and she’s about to fall over under her exhaustion. Whatever adrenaline she had is long since gone. She looks around and recognizes where she is. This is Scotland Road which is famous for being a hallway that goes on forever. Wood planks beneath her feet, white walls surrounding her, and the pipes going above her head for the length of the ship. The lights of the ship are on the left side of the hallway. She lets go of the rail and moves around it to stand at the mouth of the hallway. I hear a man yell the name “Ida!” It sounds like it’s from below the staircase, on the deck below. She gets a bit excited and nervous despite the exhaustion. The name “Henry” comes to her mind and I can glimpse a feeling of hope mixed with what I can describe as almost a nervous fear. I believe he is the “He” she was meant to wait for at the gate. He’s there looking for her and she wasn’t there. She snaps her head toward the stairs leading below like an instinct and I’m struck with the realization that this girl is named Ida and she’s reacting to her name being called out.

Blinking hard, she opens her mouth to call out to Henry. She can see the water begin climbing the staircase on the deck below. During her frantic running around, the sound of rushing water was a constant to her. But as she contemplates calling out to Henry, there is a new sound. It’s a creaking, grinding sound like two cars slowing grinding against each other at a slow speed. The wall to her left is coming apart quite literally at the seams. A popping sound distracts her from Henry down below. The bolts holding the plates forming the wall have given way and the two plates and coming apart in a V shape. For just a moment, I can see her eyes and they are a startling gray color. Like the color of the sky in December when it snows. She wonders at the metal plates coming apart at the seams for a moment before it lets loose and plunges a tidal wave of water downwards. The water hit her from below her chin to two inches above her right eyebrow. It hits her with such pent-up force that I’m quite certain that her jaw is broken from the impact.

The water shoves her to the alcove on the starboard side, right of the mouth of the hallway. The force from the water seems to hold her there. Ida struggles to get in front of the wave pouring in to get out of the hole and make her way up to the boat deck. She knows she has to follow the water to reach it. Though she does power through the water to follow its current; She lets it carry her down Scotland Road with next to no effort on her part. The strength of the current ebbs as she gets closer to the stern of the ship. She’s nearly out of sight from the gaping wound of a wall when she’s able to stand in the water. Rather than run off out of the hallway to continue her journey, she simply stops moving. Ida is sopping wet head to toe, she’s freezing from the cold water and likely going into some sort of shock. She never moves to run, never calls out to Henry or anyone else. I can see with her eyes, the water is still coming in but she pays it no mind. The hall fills easily as the water truly has nowhere to go. It’s up to her knees, then her waist, then her chin. It lifts her up as it fills the area. Soon her nose is scraping on the pipes running from bow to stern. Water shifts her slightly and she’s facing the bow again as the hall lighting is shining in her right eye. She finally snaps out of it just in time. She realizes as the water touches her lips that she no longer has any room, she’s out of air.

She tries to such in a breath but she catches a bit of water with it. Human instinct fails her as she coughs it out, only to immediately suck in a gulp of what is now only water. I can feel the heaviness in her lungs of the water. The burning irritation of the salt bothering the sensitive tissue of the lungs. She tries to cough again only to get another breath of water. Ida sputters for quite a few minutes, seeking air only to receive water. I’m left to writhe and squirm around inside her body, feeling the sensation as if it was me. I can only describe drowning as inhaling liquid lead. it’s painful, it’s heavy, it burns. I just want it to stop. I can feel the bubbles from her nose and mouth as her lungs fill with water. The weight of it drops her body a few inches from the pipes at the “ceiling”. She’s now fully submerged and leans back instinctively to relieve the pressure on her chest. It doesn’t help. Her lungs are water balloons overfilled. The pressure is unbelievable and I can feel something rip. I don’t know if the blood vessels have popped or if her lungs themselves and have ripped open from the strain. I have experienced migraines, car accidents, broken bones, and kidney stones. None of these come close to what pain her body is feeling.

Ida begins to lose consciousness as I rejoice that I don’t feel her pain anymore. From her left eye, I notice that her outstretched left hand jolts like she’s been electrocuted. The entire body felt the shock and responded in an awkward twitch. It happens again. Ida looks up again. She can see the white pipe directly above her. To her right, the electric lights running from the bow to stern are still there. They are still lit up with electric light despite being submerged. The yellow light on the starboard wall is a miniature sun to her. It shines off the water and creates a sickening green tint to the water. It’s almost a deep algae green, much darker than in the film. The water seems to sway above her as if the current is still there, lulling the water from the left to the right wall and back again. Ida is mesmerized by the light and water movement. Something about the movement and colors captures her attention as her consciousness drifts off. I can feel her eyes roll to the back of her head. Suddenly, I float out of her body like stepping out of a car or going up in an elevator.

I understand later this is likely the point of her death.