For part of the dream, I was reading about the story, and part of the time I was experiencing it as if I was in it.
The world in the book I was reading/experiencing was a very strange one. For the most part, the world was a flat one. Imagine a flat disk, almost like a dinner plate, that's about a mile across. The entire disk is the surface of a body of water. New water came from below at exactly the center of the disk, and it flowed outwards to the edge and ran over. The water came from and returned to "nothing" because whatever was below the disk was not known.
Around this disk of water were something like canyon walls. These walls were about four or five stories tall and muddy red in color. There was a space of a few feet between the edge of the water disk and the canyon walls that allowed the water to overflow and fall down into the bottomless abyss below. In the surface of the canyon walls there were doors and windows carved in them, and this is where the people lived. The doors and windows resembled many of the cliff dwellings of some of the southwest Native Americans.
That was pretty much all there was to this "world." There was nothing above it, and there didn't seem to be anything below it. Well, it didn't seem to be resting upon anything. It just floated out there in this atmosphere bubble. It was almost like a ring shaped island in the middle of an ocean, except that there was no ocean for it to sit in, and the water that was there didn't even extend quite all the way to the island itself.
As for the story that was going on, I don't remember most of it. I know that part of the time I was reading about the story, and other times I was in the story, or at least watching it from a first person perspective. During the times that I was reading the story, I was sitting or standing in a place that closely resembled the dining room of Grandmama's house in Weyers Cave.
Part of the story was just about the people and how they lived. The people were basically like a port town or village from the 17th or 18th century. There was an older man (a father type of figure) and young girl that was about 10, and they were going about their "normal daily routine." The father was basically teaching the girl his trade so that she could learn it and do it at a later time. Many people in this place made their living by going out into the water for things, such as fishing, I suppose, or doing something to help maintain the, for lack of a better word, stability of the water.
Evidently there was something about the water to be maintained because there seemed to be a constant sense of how important it was to do certain tasks to keep the water from... doing something. I don't know exactly what that something was, but it would basically lead to catastrophic world failure and destruction if it wasn't taken care of.
At one point something DID happen, and the girl wound up getting swept up into this event where she wound up going under the city/world into these deep caverns because the water feeding upwards had become too strong and was threatening to somehow destroy the water disc or the world around it. The girl was wandering around, and there was a river of lava to the right side and she was carefully walking down a path cut in the side of the giant open cavern. The path went around the outer wall of the cavern in a downward spiral, and in some places it went through parts of the cavern wall that suck out into the middle.
Sometime around this time I came back out of reading the book and I was talking to someone about it. I think that I had somehow gotten a different visual in my head of how the world in the book was laid out, and we were discussing it.
