THAT DAY

I just read "1001 Erotic Dreams". Strangely, it completely lacks two of my commonest dream-themes: cross-gender dreams, and intelligent animals or animal people. A thousand dreams, and mine aren't there.

Next I tackle some of Freud's THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, but soon I get mad at him and quit... as usual. He says, if I understand this murky man correctly, that all "psychic" dreams are mistakes, period! He concludes an otherwise plausible analysis of an apparent psychic dream by simply wishing away the psychic element. He claims the woman who dreamed it censored the REAL dream and her reported one is a false memory! I stop, overcome with contempt. What arrogance!

Oh, he's a true scientist all right. "My theory is evidence. Your experience is anecdotal."

THAT NIGHT

I give up my home and run off with Floyd Freud, a wild man who sails the streets of Palo Alto on a raft. It floats as if the pavement were liquid.

Floyd is reckless, he never stops for lights. I'm scared, but it feels natural not to... after all, rivers don't stop and go, do they? He sleeps in front of houses, evades or bluffs the police. Tonight he pulls over at a corner on busy Middlefield Road. I don't see why, seems a bad place to me. Hesitantly bring it up. He hadn't noticed at all! All this time I thought he saw factors I didn't, but he's just less sensitive. He speaks in firm simple statements and does what he wants. He intimidates me. We're sitting ducks for the cops here.

Floyd said "Bring what you need." So I did. Pictures and frames, mostly! "I'm sorry the extra weight'll slow down the raft a bit." Only the raft is now a flatbed truck, and our stuff gets mixed up in the bed. Sorting it out, Freud sees what I brought--and he's FURIOUS! "Pictures of psychic dreams aren't essential!" "But I'm a dream artist, these ARE my essentials!" My essence in fact...

All the fuss eventually attracts the cops.

The local cops are all followers of a Fascist power that's on the rise. They take us to their leader, just over a hill. On the far slope, in an open field, stand a phalanx of Gods! Greco-Roman looking, bigger than human, and not stone. Alive. They're conversing with the new Hitler! Are they signing up for the new sturm und drang?

Floyd Freud is eager to join this disciplined organization.

But my intuition says the speaker for the gods is not what he seems. He promises the Nazi leader he can have any one wish, and join the ranks of the Gods if he wishes wisely enough.

New Hitler speaks loudly enough for all to hear. "I wish for immortality!" Thunder rolls, and instantly I know the offerer is a demon--or a sophist. He may have summoned up the images of all the other Gods just to bait the trap... but HE is quite real, and fiendish. He's tricked the Nazi leader into the doom of Tiresias--he won't die, he'll just get older and crippler and tireder till he LONGS for death... but he can never have it. Tiresias shrank into a grasshopper at last. In his pursuit of immortality, into what will this man shrink?

And I wake, and shrug at the shrunken shrink Freud shrank to.

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