I was out walking in the city. Parks nearby, fresh rich smell of grass right after rain. Late afternoon sunlight.

People were with me, and we all had backpacks on — some kind of hike maybe? Field trip? Thad from work was there, and he was being shunned, subtly, by the rest of the people I was with. It made me squirm to watch him ostracized. To get my mind off of that, I looked up at the sky, clear and blue. A shape appeared there.

At first it seemed like an eye-floater, transparent and glassy, the kind you see lazing across your vision. But I concentrated on it — it was more. A gossamer, amoeba-like Mass slowly floating down, almost completely transparent. You really had to focus on it; if you stopped concentrating it disappeared from view.

I was thrilled; it felt like something heavenly, alien, awful and beautiful all at once. Everything slowed down as the feathery thing came closer. I knew it was on the verge of slipping away, so I just stood there trying to relish it before it vanished (in the way you desperately cling to sleep-bliss before you fully wake up). But suddenly I knew I would secure it, I knew it wouldn’t fade, I felt sure I could bring it to me, have it fuse with me. And it did: it floated down, floated down, until finally I touched it, brought it to me.

Now I seemed to be inside it, seeing the world from within its clear film, moving and breathing in this amorphous, clear plastic wrap. It did not interfere with my movements at all; it anticipated me with uncanny intelligence. I tested it out giddily, wandering around and waving my limbs, watching the bubble-film shape and mold around me.

Soon I realized that being in the bubble had its drawbacks; I was forced to see shapes, colors, words imprinted on the screen of my vision. Realizing this, I paused, becoming disoriented, my vision a chaos now of reality on the one hand [the city, the trees and grass in the park] and on the other, these new images and words branded on the plastic wrap I lived within.

Suddenly, in an epiphany, I realized what all this nonsense actually was displayed on the surface of the bubble film: different products, nearby specials and bargains, store openings, sales, promotions, names of best-selling books, DVDs, CDs, live music tickets. I kept staring, hard; I realized I was breathing from within some kind of bio-holographic marketing/advertising skin, trapped in ad-film.

Now I understood. Somehow in walking around that day I had mentally made clear my interests, likes, dislikes, and this custom-made ectoplasm had sensed me and floated in on me from the sky so it could wrap me round and forcefeed me marketing. I was repulsed — but more than that, let down, sad. I felt like it had all been a cruel trick, this sign of a world outside of ours, of something bigger than me, than us, than everything … I felt I had made contact in a meaningful way with something eternal, beautiful, magical, maybe extraterrestrial, but no — it was just us. it was just a man-made object designed to exploit my buying patterns, something I had helped create by my very matrix of buying history monetizable interests.

I scrubbed myself clean of it somehow — it was not laborious, it was like unpeeling glue from your palm, surprisingly easy to discard once you applied yourself to it — and we kept walking through the city.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

This is more than a year old. I found my dream-log notes on this and thought I’d post.

This dream, like many of mine, happened — or was recalled in — disconnected fragments.

Old Dream in Three Parts: Father, Alien Flowers, Mother

I

   Meters hanging down, affixed to
long metal pipes,
surrounding my father’s bed,
a ticking steel curtain; 

   I don’t know
	and am afraid of
what they measure.

II

Now a patch of forest,
and squishy white snow
that’s actually no snow but
living substance:

glad gateway to some alien land,
grasping at my ankles,
sucking at my skin in tickling welcome.

I bend down, look closely:
tiny, pale nibbling flowers
with wild gem eyes.

An old man approaches,
skeptical, eyeing one of them.
Vapor pours from calyx,
makes him sing. 

And there he is, singing. He says:
“I didn’t know it was that easy!”
Overjoyed.
And he just sings his song. 

Magical soft alien flowers
in this bend in the woods. 

I hope no one finds them. 

I hope no one kills them.

III

Mom told me dad shot an alien.

I was so so mad that she never told me,
I was outraged.

I suspected her of lying:
“Then why isn’t it in the news?”

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

    Dream: I’m in a car. A small portable electronic keyboard is on my lap. Despite its size it’s filling the car with massive grand piano resonance as I play. I’m performing one of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes (something which in waking life would be laughably, absolutely impossible). I find I haven’t prepared well, but I’m playing my best. I can approximate on a general level the activity of the piece — I’m roughly outlining the music, giving an impressionistic account of it — if the music were a relief map then I was slicing everything away but prominences, peaks, valleys and deep oceans — the other passengers aren’t really paying attention. They’re talking idly, it’s beginning to irritate me. My embarrassment at their indifference alternating with brazen confidence.

I’m now at home, playing the piano while my mother and Uncle are watching television. Again I’m playing Liszt, and I go to seek my 16-yr. old sister’s guidance. I carry the portable keyboard to her bedroom. She is giving cryptic looks and begins to explain chords and basic music theory, subjects of which she’s wholly ignorant in waking life. She begins to talk about Eugene: a former student who had displayed some level of mastery early on in his career and who was later famous for asking amazingly incisive questions about harmony or structure or the proper rubato to apply to a difficult piece, who would appear to absorb the answers, the key distinctions and lessons, but who would apply none of it to his work, leaving everyone baffled. His skills disintegrated rapidly, his career crumbled. I listened to her, envying his arrogance. Missing the point that he was a failure, I became jealous and vowed to outperform him.

The phone rings. I pick it up in my room. Carissa — that’s my sister — is with me. The receiver is quiet, but soon there are sounds in the background as if someone else had picked up on the line. I immediately suspect my father. Whoever’s calling isn’t saying anything, and my dad’s listening in again. I know to go to his bedroom, where he always is. I never stop to think that it may have been father himself calling me from his room just to get my attention. I leave my sister and walk into his room.

His presence fills the space like molasses, oozing, oppressive, without safe gaps and spaces to breathe in, I feel him in waves — he is holding the phone and in the middle of muttering something like “why the fuck doesn’t he come in right away he knows I’m calling him” — he sees me, throws the portable receiver at me and I think to catch it but I can’t, I’m carrying a giant book, so I can’t make a clean catch, I watch the phone bounce on the floor. He is pissed as hell yet stays in his chair, looking at me. As if to justify his flinging of the phone at me, and make me feel guilty about not catching it, he shows me the palm of his hand, which is ruined, scarred, mutilated from some accident.

I nod.

Suddenly the oppressiveness in the room relaxes. His tone becomes whispery, confidential. He tells me that “something bad happened to your mother last night — one of the cats got very sick. It almost died. She had to take care of it. This upset your mother greatly. … It almost died.”

I knew he was going to suggest I comfort her. I was to be his carrier pigeon, his ambassador of comfort to mother. All prior, similar failures of his seemed to gather and flow around this present one — I was conscious of a sudden spinning wheel of resentful memories, with what he was asking now of me as the hub — this sudden congress of memories struck me numb.

Father still held his hand up in earnest, gnomic, votive sign, palm facing me, the skin of it a spidery network of gouges, some raw, all crisscrossing. A glove of scar.

I stood there, breathed slowly.

I accepted everything.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

Two Dream Filaments In Succession

   A pavilion, eight or nine of us left, waiting, sprawled on grass. Some of us living in abandoned cars, others spread out on blankets. Dwindling food and water.  Long since having accepted what was to come.
   Still, we laughed, we were bound and being drawn closer every day.  We flirted, snapped; we formed alliances, we tore them up and scattered them and danced on top of the leaves. Everywhere warmth and a heightened sense of living, a bloom in skin and voice and being as if all of us were pregnant for the first time.
   As if death was a friend, a game when you are forced to rely on others only.  When you are reduced to just relations and interaction. Death the magic, death the quest; not resigned to in despair, or looked to with insane hope, just felt constantly with a kind of quietly ecstatic fulfillment.
   So much glad surrender of self into other.  Death the only possible issue of so much fulness.

   We’re in the tropics. The old woman pauses at the gate, now chained shut, confused & alarmed, lifting the chain, looking at me.
   How could I explain it to her? They chained and locked down the lot, my house and her house both. Everyone dead.
   Anyway, how was it she didn’t hear the shots, the screaming? I think about it, suspicious. My mind’s screenwriters slipping, plot splintering in favor of morality, message.
   The chains somehow slacken, untangle and collapse with the barest breath of sound. We slip out together.
   In our flight, she grows younger. Who is she? At first a doddering and half-pathetic creature who can’t possibly be able to help me. Now a younger woman, not quite beautiful, but with serene features, quiet, wise and strong.
   There is a baby still in the compound. We meet a doctor in a cafe — arrogant, whirling with amphetamines, ugly –  trick him into going there with his staff to help and treat everyone but also to bring back the child.  He agrees.
   Later, mother. She walks with a near-deformity, her right foot turned inward and clawed. I try to point it out to her, I even go so far as to mimic her walk. She laughs and dismisses me.

The Blonde was in the tent, tall and lean, in the soft dark tent with the rest of us. We sat on cushions and blankets in a circle.

I felt strong & eager. My name was chosen for me: Garantan. Our names were created by the Blonde, based on nothing we were allowed to know.

Outside the snow was everywhere, fine & powdery & always falling. It felt like Maine, but no one knew for sure where we were.

Details emerged: we had been flown up to this wooded place: $1000 apiece to be a part of the colony. One by one we were to be eliminated until only the winner was left. We didn’t know what was to be won. We just knew there had been no other option but to accept this and come.

And so this name-choosing in this tent, this was part of the introductory ceremonies. The Blonde presided over them all. We feared her and wanted her, all of us, regardless of age or sex.

The days passed and I felt so radiant, so connected with everyone in the colony, even as I knew we’d soon be trying to outdo and eliminate each other with whatever viciousness was required of us. This harmony was in my skin and fingers. I wanted everyone’s eyes and laughter, even their hidden feelings, their secret hates. I wanted more and more of it. I wasn’t afraid of anything.

And yet I knew what my flaws had been. I knew in the beginning I had been almost pompous where everyone else had been humble. When I’d chosen my sacred words to represent me, I had picked colorful, audacious words, uncaring. And it had been noticed.

Still, I was often shy & scared, and I didn’t mind showing it. I got closer to people through this, and I knew it helped me advance further in the competition. I didn’t want to bury anyone, just paint as loudly as possible while exulting in everyone else’s colors too.

Time passed and I realized how many people from my daily life were there: coworkers, neighbors. So many faces I recognized. And as the contest drew closer to its end, our ideas of our importance swelled.

 (Read More . . .)

I’m at some small party, in a house I don’t recognize.

A man, disheveled, mushmouthed with drink, is suddenly standing at the doorway.

He holds forth on why drinking’s no good. “You get too focused on the abstract,” he says, wet-lipped, florid-jowled. It lifts one into Foggy, Lofty, Philosophical Circles, he tells me. It orbits one out of the normal grounded details of everyday life. Instead of talking to people about normal things, you get to talking about big capital letter concepts: Love, Art, Law and Truth. He shakes his head in time with his harangue in hearty thespian punctuation.

Four or five friends of mine are there, watching me nod patiently. Their presence & judgment behind me feels massive and claustrophobic.

I want to claw a pit out of the carpet, into the earth, and squirm into it like a scurrying beetle. To be anywhere but here, suffering these slurred homilies.

He and I go into my room together, where with dread I expect him to discourse further.

Hulking, goofy-eyed, he lurches into my room, sweeping bottles off my dresser with a meaty forearm.

But it’s not all alcohol, I tell him, alarmed, watching the bottles crash. Only one little bottle of Vodka, I tell him. One bottle.

He looks at me with gentle reprimand in his eyes. It’s an almost magical transformation. His features all come together in knowing fatherly disapproval, nothing ogreish or condescending or ironic.

Just a warm & inviting urge for me to do better in his eyes.

Unable to bear this, the core of me blackens.

I had exposed a false figure of power, a false jesus.

He had had a following in his house in the desert. Two blonde twins were his bodyguards. He was a small man, wiry, thin, asian. I had once felt affection for him. After I saw him brought low, I felt stupid, sullied, I felt like a total piece of shit.

Then I flew through the house, flying through windows. I flew up into the gray and tan skies. Smoke was everywhere, and then there were mangroves, and everglades, and the rich smells of the swamps.

Over and over again, I flew through windows, shattering them. I never got hurt. I never got cut.

Two lovers on a hill, standing and kissing.

Two other lovers in a car, upset, backing up their car faster and faster in a straight line, trying to run over the first pair, going up the hill backwards, top speed now, bearing down on the standing pair like a bull.

The car misses. Like a skier on a ramp, it’s launched smoothly into the air by the hill’s slope, its flight perpendicular to the earth. The standing lovers cheer, as you would a feat of archery or a skillful tennis backhand. The car, hanging in the sky for a moment, like an arrow shoots straight back down the same way it came, and explodes.