Dream: Eden

I dreamed that my name was Eden. I did not know this, but my mother had been visited by an angel when she was pregnant, who told her to give me that name. The angel also told her that I would eventually die in the garden that I create.
My mother was terrified. She did name me Eden, but she had extremely strict rules about the time I spent outside. I was forbidden to plant anything, to play in well-cultivated parks or to pick flowers. I wasn't even allowed to draw pictures of gardens. I spent most of my childhood indoors. We moved to the city when I was very young, so as to limit the time I spent in natural settings.
One day, when I was ten or eleven, I was at a friends house. They had a pretty orchid in a pot of soil in the windowsill. It was wilting slightly. My friend left the room for a moment, and I leaned over the pot and kissed the wilting orchid. It immediately began to perk up. New buds started to grow out of the stem. I saw a tiny bud struggling to open. I breathed very gently on it, and it unfurled.
Over the next few years I noticed my effect on plants and even animals. Flowers turned their faces towards me as I walked by. Animals of all kinds always tried to touch my face wherever I went. Plants grew faster and healthier if I breathed on them.
I eventually moved int my own apartment, which was covered in vines and flowers within one year. There was a commotion one day with the landlord and tenants, as a gigantic lemon tree seemed to have grown up through the lobby floor overnight. I never told my mother about any of this because of what I thought of as her neurotic fear of botany.
As I aged into my twenties, I noticed an increase in the strange effects I had on my surroundings. For the first time, I noticed the effect I had on people. I seemed to bring out the best and the worst in them. I saved people's relationships, and even their lives just by talking to them, especially if I could somehow share breath with them by having our faces very close together.
But sometimes I would meet people who have lived good ordinary lives, and the next time I hear about them they have done something terrible -homicide, suicide, getting arrested or committed.
The first time I ever found a snake in my apartment, I was understandably shaken. Like all animals, it tried to touch my face. This felt different though. Instead of the love and even reverence that I felt from other animals, the snake's gesture felt mocking and malevolent. From that moment on, I found snakes in my city apartment every few months.
I very slowly began to realize that I carried Eden inside of me. I breathed the garden.