BEFORE

I'd been having a series of nightmares about figures I found repulsive, often discovered in cellars and such; this dream felt like the culmination of the series.

THE DREAM

I was gliding down a stream in a tunnel, floating on the water. I met boat after boat of Chained Souls floating down... to Hades? No! Robed demons pushed them up to a hole--they shoved entire boats through, somehow. I could see a slice of blue sky out the hole, but feared to climb up the cavern walls and try to stick my head through. I didn't think I'd fit, somehow--though the boats did.

Instead, I went down. Down a long spiral stair. With the Lizard King. Green, horrible, crowned.

At the bottom, I found myself in his Court. Not as a visitor, as his Queen!

I loathed it, loathed him, all of them. But I was trapped there in the pit. No way free.

He raped me, though he didn't see it that way--we're married and he wanted an heir. So he forced me to have a child with him, a horrible child! A hideous lizard prince. I felt he was evil, as evil as his dad.

And I feel he's not mine. Only the child of my body, not of my spirit.

EDITOR'S NOTE, 2001

• The illustration is mine; Xanthe draws her beautiful dreams, but not her ugly ones; and she saw no beauty in her lizard husband. Or lizard-child.
• At the time, Xanthe was getting manipulated by her boss and several co-workers into doing more than her share of work at the library where she and I both worked. She repressed her anger at this, walking around trying to be calm and happy with this black cloud of anger over her.
• As Xanthe told me this nightmare and a whole series of similar ones, I felt strange. She dreaded these dream-people so much! And it wasn't clear why--she was never killed or seriously injured, just trapped among people she found revolting. Her loathing seemed... excessive. I grew surer and surer these repulsive figures were Jungian shadows--images of Xanthe's own anger, force, and power. The power to refuse to be used. And as she did begin to say "no", the nightmares faded out. Xanthe had dreams of equally bizarre beings, but they no longer repelled her; she saw their strangeness as beauty.

FOLLOW-UP, 2021

I now know why I was more comfortable with this dream than Xanthe herself was. I'd met this lord and his court, found these strange water-dragons more attractive than scary, and turned into one of them--in a dream 18 months earlier! But I'd had so many other vivid dreams between mine and Xanthe's, I'd totally forgotten... until this year. Transcribing an old journal, I stumbled on a startlingly parallel dream: my Lord of the Underworld.

--Chris Wayan

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