The World Dream Bank: Birds on Fire

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Birds on Fire

dreamed 2008/9/15 by Wayan.

THAT DAY

I just finished Terrorist Hunter by Anonymous, a compelling, caustic, invigorating book by an Iraqi woman who infiltrates American mosques and combs websites to find recruiters and funders of terrorism. Her criticisms of the FBI and CIA's hoarding of data and active blocking of investigations, particularly of Bush's Saudi Arabian buddies, are savage; she considers them nearly as culpable as the terrorists themselves.

THAT NIGHT....

Deep night. Moonless black.
We're camped in a grassy fold
of California hills--
not that you can tell.

Time to wake the Hero!
He planned this wee-hour strike:
we'll surprise the enemy tribe
on the hill just to the north.

I whisper his name three times,
careful not to touch him.
For he's a trained assassin--
slash-prone. And I like my limbs.

Awake, he spies a strange strip
faintly glowing red. A folded fan,
or a unsheathed longsword?
He takes it as a portent. Well,

he's the expert. So
he tears and cuts a gull-
sized paper bird, and then
goes forth to face the foe.

Oops! They're awake, huddled behind
their spear-thin
spear-tall
famously cunning Hero.

He leads, they timidly trail,
thin-tall spears in dawn-dim hands
on the four-lane road up to
the College of San Mateo.

Our Hero has a plan to strike
panic in their hearts. He lights
the bird, and nods to his tall
Lieutenant, who sets it flying

flaming toward the enemy. But
the poor bird flutters round and down
to fall ash-dead at our feet.
Well, it horrified me.

Our Hero so far disappoints.
On the other hand, their Hero soon
gets cut off from his cowardly troops!
We chase him through a house with rooms

whose doorways form a squarish ring.
Round and round the heroes go!
He tries to hide, but we're all in loud
Renaissance garb, and it's daylight now,

so lurking doesn't work so well.
We catch him at last, although
our Hero ain't much help--
so big and muscled and slow.

What do we do with him now?
Theirs, I mean, not ours...
I wake shivering in the dark.
4:15 predawn. A chilly fall,

and no heroes here at all.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Inept he-man who endangers his own = President Bush. His Lieutenant: Cheney or McCain?
lanky cunning barbarian hides in the hills = Osama bin Laden! Terrorist Hunter quotes an old Arabic pamphlet about Osama's early years in Afghanistan; he was already plotting jihad against the West. He didn't turn later, as the CIA claims--he used those suckers from the start.
Osama bin Laden defends the College of San Mateo? Weird. Oh... I took one class at CSM, from a teacher who was inexplicably hostile--he actually falsified my score on the final exam! Later I learned he and my dad were enemies in a nasty political fight; my dad thought him racist.
so... CSM = jihadist Islam! Tribalism/racism, hurting the innocent, and just plain lying. Just like the Wahhabi billionaires who secretly fund hate speech and recruit terrorists in thousands of mosques, and pose as financiers, clerics and scholars. Like that CSM teacher posed.
bird on fire that just falls: the 9/11 victims. Terrorist Hunter mentions that a kid who saw people in flames jumping from the tower said "mommy, the birds are on fire."
Failure to scare the enemy: well, it's been 7 years now since innocent people-birds fluttered in flame down through Manhattan air. Has Osama been caught? Have his Saudi backers been exposed? If I were them, I wouldn't be scared of Bush.
Loud Renaissance costumes: 1: I read that poet Theodor Weiss dreamt a blood-and-thunder Shakespearean sequel: Caliban's taken to Europe and must save Prospero and Miranda from a fiendish plot. I longed to see that play! My dreams complied. 2: The plots described in Terrorist Hunter sound Elizabethan. Why not? The Wahhabist perpetrators of 9/11 and their backers have their heads in the 16th Century--or earlier.
Sunny house: a Palo Alto house I lived in. At the time I was lonely, with no girlfriend, worked at Stanford, saved up my money; was ill a lot. Could mean any of these--loneliness, celibacy, frugality, academia, illness. Possibly just Stanford: education, modernity.
What's it all mean? Well, I think the dream hints that George W. Bush, after years of being outfoxed, may suddenly, miraculously catch Osama bin Laden just in time to try and swing the 2008 election! For seven years Osama's been a fine distraction from the Saudi Arabian billionaires who fund jihad, building the next ten al-Qaedas--Bush's friends and business partners! (Terrorist Hunter claims the FBI and CIA not only won't finger Saudis, they harass other antiterrorist units who try.) But my dream thinks Osama's now of more use to Our Hero as a trophy to hand to McCain. Now, I hadn't consciously thought anything of the sort; I'm not a conspiracy buff. But we'll see...
ACTION: just in case the dream is right, I'll post it soon as I'm done writing.
This is Dreamverse #25. Every day, a dream-poem! Political hack-job or not.

For those who have come here purely because of its political prediction... Let me clarify. This is a dream. A real dream. Not a fable, not a metaphor, not a back-dated editorial commenting on the capture of Osama. I dreamt this. I'm writing this Sept 16, 2008, having awoken from that dream, and haven't yet checked the news. And won't before I post this. What you see is what you get.

Though that's not necessarily true of heroes.

LISTS AND LINKS: nocturnes - war - fire - birds - 9/11 attacks - politics - fundamentalists and other fanatics - predictive dreams - dream poetry - the Dreamverses project - the next Dreamverse: the Moomin Commissioners of Time -

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