Dream 1, 1988/6/3: AZOREAN PAN

A few years ago, a French family decided to settle an uninhabited islet in the Azores. Lonely out in the mid-Atlantic, but the climate's warm-temperate, mostly sunny but with plentiful winter rains.

One year later, a submarine comes by to drop off supplies and check on their health. The captain finds the dad in a little fishing boat and says "Your nets have shrunk from 12,000 square kilometers to 5-6000..." Not meters--kilometers.

Nobody has nets that big! Did the captain mean the area the dad goes out to fish in? It can't be the area of the island--this modest islet is nowhere near that big--now. Long ago? Are the Azores that unstable?

The father says only "We're fine, just fine." He seems evasive. I'm left confused. What's he hiding?

I get a small boat, and land secretly, alone, on the far side of their isle, to see what's here. Walk up through coastal meadows toward the wooded central hill. Flowers all over. Beautiful unspoiled land.

From the summit, I spot their farm. Only a modest vegetable garden so far, by their home. Most of their food must be from the sea.

But then, in a grove, I meet their secret. Their impossible secret. A translucent Pan-like figure with horns, two meters tall, striding through the trees on long goat legs. Ghost, hallucination, local god?

And then, to my amazement, the settler-family comes out to their garden and sings and plays instruments... and the god strides swiftly down the hill to them. He's compelled to show himself.

For music summons the ancient love-god Pan.
NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Greek myth in the Azores, and the hint that one island shrank: no surprise! I work at Stanford Library, and they just got a bequest: dozens of books by the Theosophists, those early Twentieth Century mystics who believed in spirits, Greek gods... and Atlantis. They believed it was where Plato said, the mid-Atlantic--the Azores are just the last mountain-peaks of the Lost Continent. (2022 note: now, a century later, the Atlantis myth looks like a folk memory of the tsunami drowning the Minoan cities on Crete circa 3700 years ago, when the volcanic isle of Thira exploded.)
• Pan the ancient god: does he mean sex? music? fun? nature? fertility? All of them?
• Music summons Pan: hmm! Take music seriously, practice more regularly. Music can--no, will, says the dream--lead to miracles.

I dream I find a shelf full of novels about a fat black Catholic detective. Each title is a woman's name--a client he works for, or falls for, or both at once. All the names are different, so you know each girl gets just one book: vanishes, goes to jail, or (most often) dies.

One book looks a bit different. I open it idly. Whoa! same author, but not a detective novel at all. It's a picture book with mythical illustrations, two-toned, mostly ochre with pale-blue accents. The cynical atmosphere of the crime series is all gone. Instead, the images have an elusive mystical glow, like Odilon Redon's late paintings.

But also, sex infuses every scene. Demigod-ish figures climb rocks, pose and flirt. Pretty explicit flirting, since they're all naked.

One set of sketches show a desert full of mythical creatures... flirting too! Sex between unlikely lovers--of different species. The last image I recall: a mermaid lying on her back in a rock-pool, kissing her boyfriend, a Greek god of sorts, who has laid his syrinx by his side.

Pan's baaaack...

• Women near this private eye all die: in Ross MacDonald's mysteries, women near his private eye Travis are doomed--worse than those poor redshirts on Star Trek. It's so consistent that years ago I dreamed I was trapped in one of his books as Travis's girlfriend. I knew what that meant, so I quit in the most emphatic, Noir way I could: I shot the detective!
• Series shifts sharply from sexist mayhem to peace and love: huh?
• Pan again! whatever he means, it's important. And music summons him.
• ACTION: Get serious about music. Practice. Look for others. Start a band.

Processing books at the library, I'm handed Ross Macdonald's "Lonely Silver Rain". One more of his Travis McGee books. Do the women still die? I skim it. Yeah, mostly.

THAT EVENING

Turn on the TV. My candidate for President, Jesse Jackson, is giving his concession speech (sigh). Strange--he brings his ENTIRE big family up on stage--big in both senses! Numerous AND consistently chubby. Wait... related fat black people up on a... oh. They're the series of related mysteries up on the shelf in my dream.

But why'd my dream turn a politician into a detective, or his family into books?

Next up... the TV mystery Moonlighting. I've been watching for months, wondering if the two leads will EVER get together, or just flirt forever. Tonight it shifts abruptly from mystery to full-on romance! As in my dream.

YEARS LATER

I posted this partly just to draw Pan & a mermaid, but also to show you how I experience time. From how you humans talk, you mostly live in a straight timeline. Mine's more a symphonic braid of past, future, and alternate-present elements resonating and suggesting others; I sense where your human present is by noting how themes swell and recede, by what's loudest in the symphony; not just the melody of single notes most of you seem to hear.

Robert Heinlein's Red Planet has a Martian elder who long ago left its body and now just swims through time, asking "What eon is it again?"

I know the feeling.

MORE YEARS LATER

Yes, I started a band: The Krelkins.

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