The rope swing and a violent awakening

This is another one of my oldest dreams that I can remember. It was definitely when I was much younger, as I remember waking up and seeing my babysitter at the time, which I will get to at the end of this dream.

As it was, in my dream, I was walking along the side of a mountain on a small hiking trail with uphill being to my left and downhill obviously on my right. The mountain was heavily wooded, and seemed quite similar to one of the many hiking trails on Snow King, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

As I was walking, I came across a small creek that was trickling down the mountain. At this creek was a rope hanging from one of the trees directly adjacent to the creek that one could use as a swing to get across the small creek (which was totally unnecessary, as you could have easily jumped over the creek to get to the other side, but it was fun I suppose). There was a group of other children who were taking turns swinging across the creek. I waited until it was my turn to swing, and I swung across the creek as normal. The thing was, my swing didn’t stop when it should have. Since the rope started at roughly a 30 degree angle from the top vertex, physics would dictate that my swing would go to less than 30 degrees on the other side. For some reason though, I kept swinging on the rope until the rope was about parallel with the ground, which resulted in me being much too high in the air for comfort.

For reasons unbeknownst to me though, I let go of the rope while I was at the apex of the swing, and I just kept flying in a parabolic fashion into the distance in another physics-defying move. My flight trajectory went much farther out than it should have, as if I was going much faster than I really was when I let go of the rope as I ended up traveling a couple miles from a simple, small, and slow start on the rope swing which resulted in me rocketing off the mountain.

The picture below kind of more clearly shows what I mean, although my toaster-of-a-camera’s quality isn’t that great, I think you get the idea. The left diagram is how it should be with real physics, while the right diagram is more how it happened in my dream.

I traveled for a while through the air, but I eventually came down, and came down hard. I landed on a cobblestone clearing next to a fountain, but it was not a fountain I recognized, because at the time (of being roughly 8-10 or so) I don’t believe I had ever seen a fountain so big. I don’t recall what the fountain looked like itself, but it was a good few-dozen feet across with a stone ring around the base of it. As I slammed down on the cobblestone area next to it, I saw about half a dozen lifeguards (from a swimming pool) running towards me with those red rescue tubes that lifeguards have (I had to look what you call those in Google because I had no idea what those were called until writing this). I don’t know why there were lifeguards at a fountain, but that’s the way it was.

The moment of me hitting the cobblestone and seeing the lifeguards happened pretty simultaneously, as the whole moment lasted only a brief couple seconds due to me waking up right after hitting the ground. What I recall that freaked me out the most was that I had what could have been called a seizure when I woke up, but I am not sure.

In the real world, we had a babysitter over, and she was sleeping on a bed in one of our bedrooms back at the old house I used to live in in Jackson Hole. I was taking a nap on one of those inflatable mattresses you would take to a swimming pool (which might explain the lifeguards in my dream) on the ground next to the bed. As I woke up, I remember shaking quite violently which in turn woke up my babysitter who got pretty freaked out. I don’t recall what happened after that, whether we told my parents or if I saw a doctor or anything like that, but I luckily haven’t experienced an awakening quite like that since.