THAT DAY

Out my window, a plume of black smoke--a big fire in the Produce District a mile away. After five minutes, off to the right near the big smokestack bordering Bayview, there's a brilliant white flash. An electrical blowout? Our power stays on (only our web crashed) but I soon learn nearby areas did lose power. I recall those snipers in recent months blowing out substations, and worry it's sabotage, but no such evidence. Just my paranoia!

Our band the Krelkins practices new songs. Work out parts. Nic creates a new deep cello part for Gaia. Simple, nice. But after two hours, we tire out and get sloppy. Mike tends to push to exhaustion. He complains my dream song Migrate through Fire is "just too hard," but I think it's just fatigue talking. Migrate's a favorite of mine, so I worry he'll discourage playing and recording it.

Just before bed, I read part of Wen Spencer's Project Elfhome. As I go to sleep, I'm still thinking of Jane, Boo, Olivia, Law and Snow...

THAT NIGHT...

I have epic dreams--at least seven, totaling over 2000 words. I won't transcribe them all, but here are the clearest four.

DREAM 2: Grope Me in the Name of Art!

A blonde girl about 15 years old and smallish for her age. She's feverishly creative. I like her, but hide that my liking includes sexual attraction. Tell myself "She won't feel sexual yet anyway." Yet my intuition says that's untrue; I sense she has sexual feelings (not love, but strong curiosity plus trust) toward an even younger boy.

Because he's younger, she hides her feelings--like me, she thinks she's perverted for having them!

He doesn't. He adores her. Adults around them see none of this--assume their friendship is presexual. Indeed I discount my own impression, until they perform in an experimental film she wrote...

They wade into a lake. She leads, he follows. The water's clear, turns her ripply but doesn't hide her. At first she seems younger, a breastless tween, in a modest one-piece swimsuit printed with subtle bronze scales; but as the hovering camera moves in, the suit magically shrinks to a lower-cut maillot, then a halter bikini, then a very skimpy bikini, then topless; as her breasts swell from flat to small to medium, from 10 years old to 15 in a single minute.

As they reach waist-deep, the boy shyly touches her, strokes her back and butt. She beams and snuggles up to him. Wanted this, ready for this. Scripted the film to give him prompts and an excuse to touch her...

...in the name of art.

NOTES

• Blonde teen, younger boy: in Project Elfhome, Boo, blonde, 14, abducted, abused... but she still protects younger victim Joey.
• Sex at fifteen: in Project Elfhome, Olivia gets bullied by her fundamentalist parents into "marrying" their cult leader. He gets her pregnant. She flees--homeless, pregnant and 15. Spencer the author is scathing toward right-wing sexists talking about Family Values. Like these.
• My family abuse was different in detail: not fundamentalist patriarchy but anti-sex feminism. My mom demonized men. Made me feel evil for showing any sexual feelings, ever. But my dream, angered by so many tales full of monstrous guys, rebelled.

DREAM 4a: Dragonfly-Bus

I'm sitting with my friend Alder on a curved concrete bench in a courtyard by a theater. The show's soon, but few people here. Through the pedestrian entrance south of us, across the soccer fields, music is playing--and though the high frequencies are lost in the distance, I recognize the chord changes. My music! Stolen. I get up and go look...

The recreation area has soccer and baseball fields divided by straight raised dikes like railroad beds. I head east along the main dike. Baseball practice to the southeast; the fields to the north are empty.

A group of kids comes toward me. Tweens. The oldest, a girl in a jacket saying RAVENCLAW--a Harry Potter fan, then--eyes me curiously, senses something--so do I--what is it?

As we squeeze past--the raised path is narrow--she pokes me with one finger, and grins. I laugh-squawk, and as we part, both look back, intrigued.

As I walk farther east, alone now, I grow uneasy out here, trapped yet visible--a perfect target. "Why anything could happen!" Picture rain falling on me.

It promptly does. Out of a blue sky.

"But worse could happen. Predators. A gang..."

Out of the west comes a bus.

"But," I think, "it could just as well be a dinosaur, or a dragon..."

The bus promptly politely complies--it turns into... not a dino or a dragon, exactly--the bus riders have their own agendas, which (mostly) exclude being lizard guts. So it stays a bus inside--you can see riders through the windows--but the outside changes to a huge dragonfly on monster wings, not bus wheels. Like an ornithopter from Dune--the crosstown version. Colorful and elegant in an Art Deco way, but those five-foot jaws are scary.

It lunges at me, but overshoots. Massive, with a stiff neck, it's slow to turn. While it trundles round, I use a shamanic trick to hide--I split into two selves, one digging into the wood chips lining the banks of the dike, the other spreading them on top to bury "me"--even though me-the-burier is still exposed, and the buried me is really just my raincoat--just my outer shell, like a cast-off skin. But it still partially counts; the standing me is now glassy, faint--hard for a blurry insect eye to see.

I hold my breath. The dragonfly-bus waves its feelers, scenting me but not touching me. At last it gives up and heaves into the air like a living chopper. Flies away. Whew!

NOTES

• Hear my own music played from a distance: I suspect this was a lucidity cue I missed--"Hey stupid, you're dreaming!"
• Ravenclaw jacket: in Project Elfhome, Joey the tengu boy, freed from his captors, gets such a jacket & treasures it. To him it means a supportive family/clan.
• Girl: probably Boo, Joey's adoptive (and protective) big sister.
• Pokes me, odd energy: the last scene was openly sexual, so my dream wouldn't disguise sex a la Freud. Could it be... Freud in reverse? The oddness was familiar. In waking life I've sensed intriguing auras and jumped to the Freudian conclusion it must be sexual when it just wasn't.
• Far-off danger nears & grows: Smoke, flash, internet outage today. I thought of snipers causing power outages--news-hyped fears?
• Mounting, unlikely fears--rain, crime, monster: did I feel guilty for being curious why that girl in the jacket poked me, and thus summon punishment? And if so... what about when awake? Do I expect (and summon) punishment for any interest, sexual or not, in anyone under 18? Because all men are abusers. Thanks, Mom!
• ACTION: Quit indulging guilt. Or else join a fundie cult espousing Original Sin. Sin for just existing.

It's time for the play, so I go back to the theater. Late; rush up, pull out my big, tripartite ticket, like three bookmarks stapled at the corner. There's Alder. Go in right after her. Old woman at the door just waves us through, doesn't even glance at the tickets.

Oddly the entrance is onstage, though that's a mere technicality: the stage is just a big round patch of floor level with seats. More a circus ring than theatrical stage. We skirt the stage to three empty seats in the front row, so we won't sidle through audience as the show starts. We sit; have heavy packs, lay them between our feet.

Alder bought a ticket for the third empty seat; a friend from her women's circle was supposed to meet us and get the ticket. Door's closed now. "She chickened out," grumbles Alder. What, is live theater a test of courage now?

The show's a musical version of a familiar fantasy novel or film. It stars three actors I know--Lorraine O. made up as a faun-girl with horns, hooves, goatish shaggy legs, and a short tail. And there's Lisa D, playing a delicate bare-breasted centaur, and Jessica R. as a catgirl in a skintight fursuit a la Cats.

All three are sexy--they look to be in their 20s again, not in their 50s, which they should be by now. All three feel unapproachable too--I'm sure they'll be all business, even if I meet them after the show. Disappointing, but I'm certain. I rarely quote Springsteen, but... "You can look but you better not touch, boy!"

Next I learn why Alder thinks this show's a test of courage. The music's all right at first, but soon a guy in a devil suit starts hogging the stage and the lead in all the songs--not a bad voice, but the composer wrote him some angry satanic music and unfortunately the band achieves it--louder and louder, uglier and uglier, til it's death metal. OW!

Devil Suit Dude shoves all the furry girls offstage and does a solo. He has to yell over the instrument din. Goodbye song, hello scream! A second solo. Ugh, a third. All the same. Yell yell yell...

As audio flogging #4 begins, I snap. Stand up to leave. Very mixed feelings. Am I chickening out by Alder's standards? But I feel manipulated--is he, or the producer, TRYING to drive us out?

Also... I think I've seen this particular production before. Not just a re-staging; every scene, line and gesture is familiar. Why? I'm slow to see it's somehow changed from a live production to canned--that damn film again!

No surprises ahead, then. At least when I saw it at home on video, I could fast-forward past the jerk. And did.

I walk out. Chicken or not. And as I choose, I wake... into another dream. And another...

NOTES

• Three cute women on stage in fursuits: Not imaginary figures, but professional actors I've met--but not in years, so most likely symbolic--acting, drama, professionalism. Though why furry I dunno. I like cats, but not Cats (the least bad song's "One note--all I can sing is just one note..." Superstar it's not.)
• Drama that repeats: I think the dream's warning my default expectation I'll be rejected is "recurring drama"--chronic, unjustified.
• Chickened out: pun! In Project Elfhome, Boo was literally "chickened out"--her genes tweaked so she slowly grew clawed bird-feet like a tengu.
• Music worsens: our band went over old songs. Good at first, but as we tired, we got stupid--and Mike started judging the songs based on our worsening renditions.
• Loudmouth devil gradually takes over: 1: in Project Elfhome, the Skin Clan foments a civil war--just as Trump's tried to foment a civil war here. 2: Echoes the last scene--my runaway guilt/fear summoned a monster. Same here? Did admiring those furry actors summon this idiot?
• Guy hogs the stage: at an art salon last month, one guy did this--tripled his time slot. Not even showing art--just ranted conspiracy theories & wouldn't quit.
• Hogs the stage twice: Predictive! AFTER the dream, at the NEXT salon, the same guy did it again, and the hosts failed to stop him AGAIN. Needed a bouncer.

DREAM 7: A Box of Bugs

Wake again, in yet a different bedroom. By my bed is a small box. I recall storing a seed or mushroom button in it months ago, hoping it'd bud or split. Open it. It split all right! The box is FULL of little mushroom-acorn-barnacle things, each capable of growing into something worth serious money.

Unfortunately, the original seed apparently had eggs hidden in it too--eggs of earwigs, beetles and silverfish, plus at least two species of centipede, a yellowish and a reddish--and a lot of slugs or leeches (but I slip and write leches) each pale yellow, 15-20 cm long, with round rasp-mouths. They crawl out and escape all over my bed. Great!

I'm fast enough to catch most, but need a bigger box to collect them in.

In the long run I may profit from the seed I sowed, but in the short term... ugh!

NOTES