In a perfect dream, spaces are so vast you can forget all about yourself and your daily worries. Time stops and everything seems to be still and eternal. In a perfect dream everybody feels safe and at ease with himself. Perfect dreams though sometimes can merge with nightmares. Not terrible nightmares, those wrapped in hopelessness and distressing solitude. Just nightmares where solitude is almost as plausible condition as life, nightmares where you look around and you find yourself lost in some place and unable to go back, unable to remember there is a place somewhere you can go back to. People are not most of times elevated enough to play god with their fantasies. But Nature has the powers to help our poorly developed imagination to keep on going. If you have not yet experienced how it must be to pass through a vision and then go back safe and sound to your routine, maybe Nature can help you. Just follow Nature’s whim. Nature is being treated badly by men all the time. Sometimes, somewhere Nature takes revenge. Not necessarily causing death and destruction of incredible proportions. Sometimes she just sits in her corner and shows you what she’s capable of. Things a human mind could hardly conjure and human languages are not allowed to describe poignantly enough. In the failure of the rational side, in the inadequacy of words, with the overflowing emotions that are partly animal instinct and partly childish wonder, Nature finds her just revenge.
It’s hard to describe the experience of our trip through the ash cloud without many other things getting the way, like remembering friends with us at the time whom had to leave to catch up with their own tomorrow’s aspirations, leaving us lonelier and dejected. As I said, words are likely to fail me. But imagine you are dreaming. And the world around you is being swallowed by deep fog. Usual colors turn the landscape into something else, alien and unknown. Car lights now and then cut through the mist, irresolutely, leaving the vehicles without solid shape and their occupants without face. The road is broken in many parts, depriving the traveller of reassuring reference points, making you feel even more alone. Above your head it’s raining, but the rain isn’t actual rain. It’s a sort of dusty material that sticks to your clothes, to your camera, to every available surface. Heavily and silently like a shroud, making everything merge in a light grey uniformity that looks a lot like oblivion. On the ground the thick ash powder retreats into depressions where footprints and tyres trails left evidences of previous visitors. Yes, visitors like you: and where are they now? In the air not a sound vibrates. Birds are not chirping, people are not calling each others. There’s nobody, no movement for the eye to cling to. It’s all perfectly still, as stagnation is the only possible condition left in the world. A world of ghosts and absences whose traces will soon be erased by the falling ashes. Like nothing ever existed in the first place.
Real adventurers we are, indeed. Our trip following the ash cloud was a short-lived one, just from Reykjavík to Vík and then back, stopping now and then to explore, collect ash samples, take a few photos and fool around with horses. It seemed like a long trip though. Not because the navigator kept on taking wrong turns, not because we were tired after a bad night sleep. It was the timelessness of remoteness. The timelessness of Nature’s forgetfulness of all human things.
I’ve never really dreamed about going to some unknown planet like people with very fervid imagination do. Maybe I used to fantasize about it now and then in a remote age of my life, but too long ago to remember. Maybe it happened a few times while watching a few scenes from Lawrence of Arabia or while playing Silent Hill. But then you find out Nature is always a better creator than all of us, with our petty concepts, constantly trying to square the circle and moving like frenzied apes from a life branch to another. And she’s generous enough to share her wonders with us, even if it’s only by mistake.