Dream? What dream?

The usual cast of characters, recast each night. The dream itself vanishes like rime under the hot breath of wakefulness, but the dream sense lingers. Michelle's dream catcher suspended over my bed. Panning old river muck for that infinitesimal glint between the grains of sand. One flash reveals in an instant the entire dream before slipping beyond the threshold of apprehension. I must remember my dreams and write them down, while avoiding the inevitable vanity of creating a "dream journal."

11/17/01
I am rehearsing a play with several others. The play has tragic overtones. At some point, the rehearsal becomes realty. Is this a play? Is this a dream?

Gulo Gulo

12/6/03
The station wagon circles around a most impressive sight: a wolverine, big as a bear, flashing white teeth and bright red gums. We stop for a closer look and the wolverine turns into a mountain lion with a freshly killed and bloodied bird between his teeth. He (unmistakably male) takes an interest in us. He drops the bird, pokes his head through the tailgate, and leaps into the back seat. He then turns into two cute and cuddly black & white kittens.

6/18/04
Dreamed of a gray fox injured somehow, perhaps by car, being tormented by children. They pull it around by its tail and poke it with sticks. I tell them to stop. The fox is whimpering with fear and pain so I become its protector. In an instant I nurse it back to health and she (unmistakably female) is able to stand up and walk. I pet her and she nuzzles my hand even as she gives a low growl and I say something like "please, just don't bite me." Suddenly she is transformed into a beautiful feral woman-child. Her face and clothing are soiled and she articulates in a way that is between a whinnying bark and human speech. Two other feral children suddenly spring up beside her, one African-American. They are similarly dressed. All three have the dark and bottomless eyes of the dispossessed.

6/18/04
An old fashioned West Virginia hex woman. A witch. You know the type: plain, middle aged, an outcast. You're getting close to something she loves, a beautiful widowed young woman with two wonderful children. "What're your intentions regarding Gov?" I tell her I love her and plan to keep seeing her. "Does that bother you?" or "that bothers you doesn't it?" In answer, she pulls back a dirty leather jerkin and reveals herself in all her primitive malignity. She is festooned with numerous strange objects made from animal parts and such, two objects in particular hang from her side, inverted bell-shaped vessels of some kind, scooped out from pickled and tanned coon or possum hide, I guess. But most ominously, a highly polished brass medallion depicting some demonic being or chthonic titular deity hangs around her neck on a chain. Eerie and frightening, an unmistakable threat. I stand warned. I say something like "oh, so now you're going to put a hex on me?" I even reach out to touch the two possum skin artifacts and she backs away with a hiss. Why the name Gov? Apparently my love has a name that reminds people of a deceased popular ex governor so they started calling her that and the name stuck.

4/25/88
Ben and Gail - in a pool of quicksilver you merged and became one. With sudden poignancy I realize you are dying - some invisible wound - self inflicted? - fists in the heart - marring a beautiful boyish androgyny.

6/2/88
I am telling someone about a dream I've had in which someone else is telling me their dream which begins to unfold as they speak, with me as participant and they as narrator.

6/25/88
Dream of GJR as I had once divined her to be beneath the childlike veneer: a boozed out, fallen slut, speaking in harsh, whispered intensities about her sordid sexual escapades. Reminiscent of Mary's narratives of life with the déclassé of bohemian New York City and Boston. Did she really need coke to get off sexually I ask. She gives me a quick look of puzzlement and mockery. No! No! You don't even begin to understand the complexity and depth of it.

7/1/94
Big exotic festival of some ancient Eastern religious order. Guests are pulled along on carts through the maze like interior of some temple or monastery. Old polished wooden floors. Those awaiting their turn are assembling a large, mysterious stereoscopic viewing device of some kind depicting the wonders of this religion.

Sect, cult....?

4/26/88
They stand, just above the horizon - two would be human constellations, their forms dissolving in sudden evening mist, stars and planets just peeking through the firmament.

2/23/86
Caravan of yogi - shaman practitioners in a high mountain pass. They come forward on horses through meadows unconcerned by my presence. Awesome shapes of the Old Ones, beings from the spirit world and other strange devices tower high above them into the heavens, moving as they move, with a trenchant dignity. A union of the divine and human realms made manifest, as though the gods had come to favor us again at last. They pause and make certain inquiries - can I guess who they are? I name them as best I can. They smile and move on.

8/6/87

An immense wooden sled is set aflame and sent careening towards the distant hills, where lies "the enemy." It will turn their hiding places into an all consuming conflagration. My love, my Teutonic queen, lashes herself to this blazing behemoth as an empowered guide and as an act of great courage. Moments later the engine of destruction slams into the hills but its vast momentum carries it up and back down upon its own path. My love, my Teutonic queen, is hurled headlong beneath the flaming debris amidst the wails and lamentations of her fellow warriors. I run with tear stained face towards the fiery inferno.

Too late!
Too late!

My blonde and bronzed Brunhilda lies buried beneath the impossible wreckage of war, her charred bones the only remains.

I collapse into inconsolable grief.

?
The sunlight streaming through my bedroom window illuminates the canyon walls down which I am falling and makes visible a fantastic landscape of sheer cliffs, gorges, arroyos and deep desert shadow. The escape of timely wakefulness fills me with a feeling of power and serenity.

?
The world destroyed by paper. LOTS of paper.