We were a small, peaceful people who lived by the rules of the earth: enough, honest speech, and a quiet sharing of warmth. The dream begins in a plain of tents and horses, where conversation was a braid of words and subtle impressions – a place where truth was felt as much as it was spoken. Then a ship came, and everything changed.
The Tribe and Its Way
We lived with no towers, no archives, no storage rooms of excess. Food was raised in modest plots; tents sheltered bodies and conversation; horses carried us gently between places. Communication was both spoken and felt – an intimacy of truth that made lying useless. There was love here: simple, practical, and luminous. The Earth provided. Greed did not fit the shape of our days.

The Visitors and the Thin Sense
When they arrived it was, at first, the old ritual of arrival: greet, share, and learn. But something in those first moments set the tribe on edge – a faint ripple of discomfort that everyone felt and tried to explain away. The newcomers were frightened: their planet had been destroyed, they said, and so they came asking sanctuary. We opened our fires to them. We offered food. We promised shelter and the soft balm of time.
The Paper That Lied
They came back with a contract. In good faith the chief signed – a seal against harm, or so it appeared. But language is a living thing and translations can hide knives. Buried in the grammar of their script was another meaning: a claim, written to look like protection, that granted them the planet and its people. By the next dawn the skies darkened with many ships. The gentle exchange turned to seizure. The tribe was rounded up, corralled into ghettos, deprived of earth and movement, and wired to a watchful, insect-light surveillance. The new masters fed us leftovers; they kept us isolated and small.
The Small Victory – Tobacco Water
In the depths of constraint, a small human discovery returned dignity to the people. A worker in a lab – one of us placed within the mechanical belly of the enemy – noticed something under a lens: an infusion of tobacco in hot water could dissolve the new gods’ tiny machines. The discovery was equal parts science, craft, and sacrament. It became a ritual: the tobacco water cleansed the trackers.
The plan was simple and dangerous. Under cover of labor and smoke, a handful slipped into a shuttle, and, using the machine’s own voice and their reclaimed vibration, they spoke into its system and opened the locks on every ghetto. The people poured out like released breath and boarded the ship. The shuttle rose like a stolen dream.
Learning the Language of Machines
Where once the machines had been nameless, now we learned to speak to them – not with wires but with vibration and intent. The shuttle listened. We asked it about a distant cluster of ice-worlds; it answered with surprises: that some cold places were warm inside, and that life endures in odd hospices. We asked to land, and the ship, indifferent and now obedient, obliged.
The Sanctuary Under Ice
Beneath the crust of a frozen planet, we found an impossibility: lagoons of turquoise, palm fronds, and birds whose bodies were hybrid – pigeon bodies crowned with heads that echoed lion, bear, elephant and wolf. Small and gentle, they nonetheless carried a protective mystery, a guardian force that lived in the shadows and kept the place inviolate. The shuttle told us this refuge accepted us. We decided to stay and heal.
The Return of the Masters and the Ultimatum
Word reached our old masters, and they came with warships. We were prepared not for slaughter but for speech – and for the last terrible option. Standing before them, I told their soldiers: no more slavery; we are born free. We will live, and if you insist on taking us back, we will use what we know to end you. The shuttle holds a destructiveness beyond imagining, and we hold the courage to use it if forced.
Confronted with that knowledge and the threat that was both practical and moral, the invaders retreated and spoke into their networks. For a time they answered our entreaty. Then the line died. We have not heard from them since.
Dream Symbolics
- Language as power – contracts that deceive, translation as terrain of conquest.
- Technology vs. Vibration – the invaders relied on instruments; the tribe survived by reasserting embodied frequency.
- Tobacco water as sacrament – the most human of plants undoes the most alien of shackles; ordinary things can contain extraordinary medicine.
- Refuge as rebirth – landing under ice into sunlight is the story of a people who leave captivity to rebuild in a place that tests and nourishes them.
- Ultimatum as sovereignty – freedom is defended not only by force but by the willingness to protect its own existence.
A Short Reflection
This dream is both prophecy and parable: a warning about the seductions of paper and power, a celebration of small remedies that restore agency, and a promise that even under the ice there is a place where life remembers itself. It asks: what do we sign when we trust? What small, human acts of care can dissolve the machinery that binds us?
Closing lines
We are not helpless. We are small medicines and stubborn words. We are the breath that learns to speak the machine until the machine listens. We are the people who can walk out from the ghetto and into a lagoon of light. And if the world comes to claim us, we will remind it that some things cannot be owned – not the earth, not the body, not the right to be free.
Leave a Reply