Star Trek. We beam down to the alien ruin. One team drives its perimeter, mapping. Our team probes inside. Climb warily up the stone front steps and between the columns. We find a sky-bare room with designs scratched deep in a linoleum-tile floor, like tigers have been breakdancing. Or clawing graffiti.

Sulu's eager to go on to the next room, but I examine the scratches: I suspect if we can translate them, the room will transport us into the cat dimension. Ahhhh.... some are angular but recognizable letters. The first few say "S-VOLC 348"--southern volcano? Are the digits degrees? 3 and 48, or 34 and 8?

Next are three Yi Jing trigrams: Li (clinging, fire, sun, light, warmth), Kun (receptive, earth) and Gen (stillness, mountain). Together do they mean volcano again?

Next: three Chinese characters saying "qiguai shi" (strange business).

That does it! As I read them aloud, reality starts to quake. Around us columns lurch and swirl. Nine waves later, we find... we're in a house on a slope, and carved into the stony bank behind it are Chumash pictographs--sun, rain, creatures. Linoleum scratches no more!

Oh, and we're all turning to cats. My cousins from next door show up with a white cat they all harass. Our recon team pulls up in the rover, parking clumsily, since they're all cats too. No thumbs.

The white cat makes a nest and lays eggs. But a spiteful cat-couple attacks her--cracks her eggs before the kittens hatch! Mean. They've been enemies across space and time--all these transformations and quakes arise from the war of egg-crushers and mother cat. And now they've pulled us all in! We all feel... discatisfaction.

"It is not logical," says Spock, "but nonetheless true."

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Decipher rock-scratches: from the RA Lafferty story "Continued on Next Rock". Anteros, the god of unrequited love, deeply rooted in body and the physical world, courts a woman who loves spirit and sky, not his poems about oozing badger brains; she says "I tried to go his stuff, I really did." But she can't; who can?
• S-VOLC 348: Or was it 438? Not sure. 4°S, 38°E is near Kilimanjaro. In any case volcanoes repeat in the next cluster...
• Yi Qing trigrams: fire, earth, mountain: volcano again! The Chinese for it is firemountain. Volcano images make sense. I wasn't mining passive dream ore, but erupting.
• Chinese characters: I'm studying Chinese, struggling with nonalphabetic characters. Yet here I read them in my sleep--literally!
• Chumash pictographs: My dad grew up in Santa Barbara, in Chumash country, so I've known of their rock art since childhood.
• Reading causes reality-quake: I'm seriously rewiring my brain!

• Chumash pictographs: When I dreamt this, I assumed the rock art was dream-inspired, but I didn't know for sure. But Deirdre Barrett's The Committee of Sleep says "these pictographs were done [1000-1700s] by the 'atiswinic... literally, "dreamer" or "having a dream"... a few were told to the missionaries as dream accounts. One of these depicts the nose of a coyote growing after he chased girls around... [a second] shows a man capturing the retreating sun with a stick. [In a third] a swordfish tosses a whale around, juggling his outsized adversary as though he were lighter than air."
• Turning into cats: sensual, sexy, intuitive creatures. I'd left home for college just weeks ago--at last escaped my parents' repressive gaze. I could follow urges and see where they led.
• Quarrel between cat-couple and white cat who lays eggs:
  1. The egg-laying cat may mean nurturance and the cat-couple, sex: agapé and eros. In many, these components of love don't conflict; but I'd been trained to be so nurturing that it DID get in the way of sex. Others mistook my caring as platonic; I was too nice. Even I didn't always know if I felt eros or agapé! So here, they quarrel...
  2. Told the dream to my friend Jay. She said "You're the cat, the eggs are your dreams, and the cat-couple is your parents--literally crushing your dreams." Plausible!
• Interpreting signs can lead us into another world: dreamwork itself! For half a century, I assumed my lifelong dreamwork got serious in spring 1974--a class I took at UC Santa Cruz, from poet William Everson, required a dream journal. But as I transcribe earlier journals, it's clear from dreams like this (or the epic, mystical, furry Dance of the Sun a year earlier) that I needed no professor to prod me! The eruption had already begun.

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