Night. I'm walking with a woman in a lonely place, dim-lit. We pause atop a gentle, brushy slope, looking down on an open field. A moonlit man glides toward us across the flat, as if skating. He wears a ragged 19th century formal suit and black top hat. He's luminous, a faint greenish glow. I think "I know that color. Bioluminescence, not magic." He beckons to us. I'm shocked he can even see us in the brush. Now I'm not so sure he's not magic. I notice he's carrying a skeleton. He beckons again. Is he alive, or a ghost?

We follow him out onto the field and find we too can glide across it like ice. It's very flat. I wonder, uneasily if the field's really a frozen lake. Is the ice thin, will we fall in?

He leads us to a sheltered grove. The trees hide cave-mouths. Here, he shows us the skeleton. "This was my nephew"... He's not a ghost. He has a secret that "You won't want to hear. I'm on a special diet. It's kept me alive a long time." How long? Since the 19th century? I suddenly regard the skeleton with a new unease. Suppress it. "I follow an all-meat diet." I know, suddenly, what kind of meat.

He says "Don't worry. I don't kill people. I have ethics. I only eat people who've died in accidents. Roadkills, mostly. My cousin here's an exception--a sudden, noncontagious syndrome. I couldn't let his body go to waste."

He has a proposal: he wants me to eat human flesh too.

I'm reluctant. "I have no ethical problem with eating roadkills--but I'm a vegetarian, my stomach won't handle meat after all these years."

He beckoned to us for a reason. He has a problem. He's sick. He believes that at long last he may be dying. For his cousin didn't have the syndrome he thought, nor a virus... but was poisoned! And the Ethical Cannibal ate the entire body except the bones, over a long period it's true, but everything that killed his cousin has gone into him.

I ask about the poison. It sounds like rattlesnake venom or some other protein-based toxin, deadly in the blood but harmless to eat. I try to reassure him he's probably not going to die from it. Try to encourage him to eat a more varied diet, to get more vitamin C and A and greens.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

• Night walk, field, thin ice: 1: Recently I night-hiked to Buckeye Canyon on San Bruno Mountain; similar terrain. 2: The ice-field from the film version of Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO, with lovers frozen under ice.
• So thin ice = Orlando falls for a girl who loves (or at least fucks) someone else. Romantically on thin ice... so the dream worries I'll fall again into abusive, codependent or unrequited love.
• Cannibal and skeleton: Incest! I've avoided my sisters and cousins and nieces because it hurts to be around them when I'm single--they're just too sexy. Fear my own feelings. But here, when I face the incest-monster, he turns out to be ETHICAL.
• 19th Century clothes: 1: Victorian! Sexual repression, patriarchy, using women; Jack the Ripper? 2: Proof he's not delusive but centuries old! Weird diets can work! I think the dream gives a thumbs-up for MY odd diet, vegetarian but high in protein and fat. But add more greens and fruits...
• The grove hides caves and a grisly secret Buckeye Canyon. I was told cockfights are secretly held in these canyons.
• I asked my dreams to propose changes in my life. I reject theif answer, but I make a counterproposal the dream figure considers. Good. We're negotiating at least!
• I did feel sick today! Dinner was heavy--hummus, spicy red sauce, meatlike eggplant, bread. Dream suggests I NEED those greens!
• Cousin was poisoned: My incest feelings hurt my sisters cousins nieces too, made me act distant with them when I love them. I'm still lugging around the skeleton (secret). And took all the guilt/poison into me!

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