Dream 1: Silky Needs a Key!

I'm living in a big shared house in north-central San Francisco, a little district called Laurel Heights.

My cousins and sisters visit, but they go out touring the City so much on their own I barely see them.

I feel lonely, bored and left out.

My sister Miriel went out with my girlfriend Silky, who's part unicorn and part krelkin (a dream creature: deer-sized, horsemaned & tailed, gracile as a grayhound; with clever forepaws having opposable thumbs).

I think Miriel and Silky took my car without even asking. I gave Miriel a house key, and I guess it works on my car too. I walk around the block looking for it, unsure if they REALLY took it.

The car's gone. Sigh.

I think Miriel and Silky also took our house pet along--a strange creature, a crossbreed between me, Silky, Miriel and a beagle, with unicorn/krelkin traits at both ends, but short legs and a long low belly like a dachshund. He seems to be an animal, not a person like krelkins or humans--sadly, he inherited a beagle brain.

But am I really certain he's doggy-dumb? Maybe just the speech center's primitive, not the mind behind it.

I feel a little guilty about Silky. She's always insisted on sticking to her furry form, even in bed with me. She's a werehuman, but she just won't change.

But purity has disadvantages. I've never even given her a house key. I have to let her in and out like she's a pet! Yet her forepaws could handle a key even without shifting to human form. Would she be willing to wear it as an anklet or a pendant? If it looked too dog-collary and petlike, I could make a radial pendant more clearly esthetic, that'd hide or carry the key. Or she could just hide it somewhere she can climb but a human burglar couldn't easily--up a tree, on the roof?

Anyway, she and Miriel and the unibeagle must stick together for now, since only Miriel has a key to get back in. Even though Silky lives here, and Miriel's just a guest!

It just isn't right. Offer Silky a key.

NOTES

• Keys, host vs. guest, person vs. pet: in Cecelia Holland's Pacific Street, set in 1851 San Francisco, Frances (black, ex-slave), the madam of the Shining Light bordello, barely trusts Mitya (Native American man) though she likes him in bed, and never trusts Gil (white man), though both admire her.
• Silky: recurring dream character--my spirit wife. She's social, sexual and playful. Strange here that Silky won't turn human so she can pass; in most dreams she shapeshifts freely.
• Krelkins: recurring dream creatures--sexy, intelligent nature spirits who only appear to humans when they want to.
• Silky has no key: I don't feel free to go out and have social/sexual fun! Right now my life's set up to make hours of art, music or writing easy. But meeting new people and dating? I haven't made room.
• Bizarre crossbreed: recurrent! 5 weeks ago, Mendelian Chimeras had a girl who's a human/peavine hybrid; 4 days ago I met Deer and Wolf Mystics.
• Beagle: Darwin's ship! Another hint this is about slow evolutionary change.
• Mute may not mean stupid: in Pacific Street, Mitya, a multilingual multicultural Aleut/Costanoan, deliberately mangles English to keep whites away.
• ACTION: Restructure my day to make it easy--routine--to get out & meet new people. But how? Where?

Dream 2: Dogs, but not Cats!

Two attractive girls live in my house. Our two house cats are closely attached to them. But then the cats have a strange history. They both used to be dogs, and just transformed into cats one day--we don't know how or why.

And even back when they were dogs, they were more than ordinary pets to those two girls. Lovers, or at least sex-toys. Loved to lick them, and quickly learned nipple-nibbling excited them so much they'd end up all in bed together licking and sucking away till they all collapsed in a happy heap.

But the girls, while keeping quiet about that, sort of think of it as a normal perversion. Girls and dogs, just a natural fit. Discreet, long-lasting, unpossessive lovers... all in the family. Extended family.

But when the dogs turn into cats, and the cats start licking their nipples and wanting to be petted and licked back, well, that's too weird, the girls get flustered. One must have standards!

Funny. Who'd have thought cats'd offer social bargains like that? Trying to please just seems unfeline, unnatural!

But really, why wouldn't they? They're in different bodies now, but they're the same affectionate souls--they love the same people. And even if you think of them as pure cat, they're getting a sexy reward--what's unfeline about that? Enlightened self-interest.

To me, the human girls seem to have a strange double standard. But then, I mated with Silky the unicorn/krelkin, and we have a part-beagle child. Next to the complications of my love life, my housemates' fuss over what's just kinky fun versus creepy weird, looks... trivial.

NOTES

• Crossbreeding:
  1. Pacific Street's multiracial Goldrush bordello, back when interracial marriage was illegal and races (not to mention genders) were seen to be as different as dogs and cats.
  2. The giant dream-inspired furry sex toys I've been sewing--the Foam Furs. I haven't been dating because I have an undiagnosed recurring fever that makes it hard to get out much--and what if it's communicable? Plus, I do have a spouse in my dreams--Silky shows up quite often. My dreams advised me "if you feel lonely while awake, make some big warm fuckable creatures to comfort you." I did. The dream was right. I do feel less lonely. They have a weird presence. (And I'll concede it's kinky only if you give up your vibrator.)
  3. Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci; a human girl stranded on an alien space station far from Earth finally realizes a nonhuman guy quietly loves her. She quits trying to get back to Earth.
• What's this scene saying?: I think it's pointing out what the girls overlooked: their pets changed once, so they may change more--to krelkins, or unibeagles, or even humans. Who knows? If so, fussing about sexual propriety or perversity in a brief intermediate stage is a waste of time.
• ACTION: quit sweating the small stuff. Yeah, my current situation's weird. My future situation probably will be too. Transitions often are--if you freeze them. So keep moving through the changes!

Dream 3: Creature Becomes Creator

Now my dream shuttles between my present--full of mixed-up, zoophilic housemates and car-mooching relatives--and historical scenes from the late 1930s--muted color, tinted the sepia of old paper. But not just viewed--lived. I'm there, between the wars, in Europe. I'm on a cafe terrace in wooded hills in rural Germany or Austria, talking with my god. My god specifically, that is--not yours. All over the world, local nature gods or spirits can pass as human. But they can take animal, plant or mixed forms, as needed, and can breed or even build from scratch their own creatures, in small numbers--Children of a Lesser God. Gods.

I'm one such experiment. I can shift to pass as human, these days, but I'm basically built on a deer, with snippets of unicorn.

At the moment my creator looks like a mustached, balding German in lederhosen and bright blue stockings (of course you know from the Kalevala that in the north woods, shamans and nature-gods all love blue socks). In the wild, my Creator prefers an animal or treeish form. Spent the whole nineteenth century as a twisted pine--very Romantic. My Creator's name is a two-root compound, half German, half Greek or Latin.

Then my creator and that Austrian cafe are gone, and I'm in the present looking back. My god died in World War Two! That rarely happens--gods don't age. But if their local source is burned or poisoned or paved, they can die. Not forever, unless the site stays sterile permanently, and that's rare--even Bikini and Chernobyl grew back, after all! So when a place-god dies, it usually regrows like a lopped-off tree, as life returns.

But in what form? If any of their creatures survive, one of them grows wiser and more multishaped until it's the new incarnation of that place-spirit. Creation slowly becomes creator!

I wasn't in Europe when the war broke out, but on America's Pacific coast, he'd sent me to learn from redwood spirits. Lucky; or was it foresight on his part? I was a just a deer, a shy talking deer with an alicorn bud on my brow, just learning how to heal, and quite unable to kill. In the Nazi era, I'd have been slaughtered.

So I survived. And I must have been the only survivor among my Creator's little experiments, for slowly, over the last 75 years, I've been imperceptibly growing from animal to nature-god! Or, looking at it spiritually, not physically, I've been a dead god slowly coming back to life, fusing with one of my descendants. Creatures.

So... I might as well quit worrying that I'm peculiar. On my way from animal to spirit, I'm not just passing for human but passing through human! Humanity's not my job. Never was.

And quit worrying that I'm so slow to change! 75 years isn't long for a divine resurrection. Brisk, even. It's going well.

NOTES

• Germany, WW2: read about a xenophobic German group saying "the Holocaust is irrelevant--ancient history." Oh?
• I'm an experiment of a 'lesser' god: echoes The White Deer's Experiment; a second vivid dream, Bastard Unicorn, has a different metaphor but the same message---don't try to be normal. Just good. In my own inhuman way.
• Germanic forest god: as Jung's mom died, he dreamt of the Wild Hunt, and felt both body-grief & soul-joy; Jung argued that our ambivalence about death and an afterlife isn't confusion or superstition but a realistic reaction to a two-sided event. His dream even announced her death before he learned of it in waking life--a well-timed proof that the body is not all.
• My nature-god died in WW2 but is slowly resurrecting: Rebecca Solnit, in her article "The War of the World", argues we're worse off now than at the height of WW2. I had my doubts; seemed to me we're healing from a near-fatal fever--call it fascism, call it patriarchy, call it anyarchy. While it's still flaring up, we have made progress. My dream firmly concurs. Hunger down, longevity up, war down, freedom up. Rebirth looks slow to those of us suffering now, but in deep time...
• ACTION: Patience, Chris. Patience, world.

FOUR YEARS LATER

I now know my differences are, as the dream said, genetic. I have a mutation causing Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome--which can cause, along with a host of odd physical problems, high-functioning autism. Amusingly, EDS patients call themselves "zebras". My case exemplifies why. Sixty years without diagnosis, due to that delightful med-school mindset focused on statistically common diagnoses: "If you hear hoofbeats, assume horse--not zebra." Too bad if that cheats the rare patient who actually is a zebra. Or, as here, a deer.

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