Last night (or this morning) I dreamt I was taking pictures of tidal waves.

Strange? That’s not the half of it.

I’ll try to recount most of my dream - as far back as I can remember.

It starts (at least as I recall) on the drive approaching the town. Surprisingly, I wasn’t driving. (On a side note, I remember that I was in large a yellow pick-up.) I just knew that I was excited. I was armed only with my (borrowed?) camera, a digital SLR (that in my dreams looked remarkably like a friend’s old Canon EOS Rebel X) my backpack, which presumably contained the rest of my gear, and the clothes on my back. I was supposed to take pictures of people surfing, and I was supposed to do it from somewhere in the middle of town.

The town, at least it seems, was somewhere in the Philippines. Heck, I got there over land routes, and the people there spoke Filipino… but then again, it was a dream, so realism is thrown out the window anyway. The town was not your typical seaside Filipino town. It looked more like a European town, probably like the setting of Chocolat. Anyway, one of the key landmarks in my dream was what looked to be a bell tower. It could have been anything else, but it looked like a bell tower… the point is that it was the tallest structure around.

Anyway, back to the dream… as we were just about the enter town, I saw this huge wave. It must have been at least 50 feet tall - high enough for me to see it over all the buildings, and enough to frame the surfers on it beside the bell tower. It was also high enough to send a spray of water all the way to the truck I was in. Given that I couldn’t see the beach (it was blocked by the town) and that we had the town between us and the beach, it must have been a heck of a large wave. Did I say that realism was thrown out the window? Well… I still believe that the physics in my dreams stay, for the most part, pretty realistic.

Moving on… when I finally drove into town, I immediately ran out of the truck, climbed up to another structure near the bell tower, and waited for the next wave to hit. I waited… and waited… and waited. In the meantime, I took pictures of anything else I found interesting - people on the streets below, surfers in the distance waiting for the next wave, the foam of smaller waves as they somehow reached the streets around the church. I waited until I saw the next big wave.

As this new wave approached, I cursed the camera’s autofocus mechanism for refusing to focus on the water, forcing me to switch to manual. I couldn’t take anything until the wave finally crashed into the bell tower, at which point I took a shot and turned away to keep the camera from getting wet. When I finally decided it was safe to finally take the camera out again and look at my shot, I woke up to a message on my phone.

Strange? I certainly think so. What makes it even more unbelievable? I actually remembered most of it.