THAT DAY

I go through experimental poems and prose by my friend Patagia and find a dream of being a bird. Ten years old, badly faded; have to transcribe it. Add to the World Dream Bank under the title Hunt and Peck.

Time for paid work now--my friend Lily's art-site. Photograph her new quilt and build three new pages with dozens of photos, captions and links.

I find a parking ticket on my car. So much for earning! Lose most of what I made today. I even reminded myself it was street-sweeping day, and still forgot--too busy working. After a year with no tickets, this makes $160 in fines since I started working. Sabotage! A warning. My spirit doesn't want me working for others. My art takes time and energy--and wage work drains both. Do what you were born to! If that means you starve, starve. But focus.

In the evening, the band Heller Highwater is playing free at Red Hill Books. Nice voices and harmonies but the songs are too safe for me. So as they play, I open my sketchbook and draw scenes from a nightmare about the complex triangular relationship between me, Emily Joy, and Cheryl. At home, before bed, I scan the sketches and title that nightmare: Burn the Eggs. Another dream-obsessed day...

THAT NIGHT

I'm in Yucatan, inside a hill, standing in a great domed cavern-room. The floor's been smoothed flat, but it's a natural cave--the Maya never built arched ceilings. It's gigantic, echoing; the Grand Central Station of ghosts.

Previous archeologists believed this was a temple or throne room, based on the circular dais in the center of the huge round space.

Above a small statue of a jaguar in a niche, glyphs cover the cavern walls. I struggle to translate them--I don't know Mayan, but the murals in the side-rooms help. Slowly piece the story together. The glyphs tell of a journey by the Average Mayan Guy...

As I read them, the glyphs refute the archeologists. This is a sort of Grand Central Station--a station between worlds. Approach the dais right, step on, and it takes you... elsewhere. No wonder the great cavern's so empty. You need that space to maneuver.

Three huge zodiacs are carved into great rings set at right angles. None are level with the floor, though--they're aligned to Earth's meridians: the equator, and a north-south line running through the Mayan heartland (their Greenwich Meridian, I guess) and one at right angles to that. Only half of each is visible, for they rise from the floor as if it's water, in three great tilted (stone?) arches. I feel as if we're inside a huge antique atom, as conceived around 1915! But this is millennia older.

IN THE MORNING

I wake up and start drawing the cavern. Perspective on the zodiac-arches is hard. Can't recall the exact orientations of the three zodiacs, so I pick angles foregrounding the figures I want to draw: a running mare and a tiger on the Chinese arch, Virgo and Sagittarius on the Greco-Roman one. It was my dream after all; and I'm a Virgo, and a Horse. But the Mayan calendar? I don't know, and don't recall it well, so I pick the jaguar.

Then Cheryl comes in and sees my dream-sketch. She complains that the Mayan or Euro zodiac is wrong in some detail. I don't care; she's missing the point: the nucleus of this atom, not its electron shells! The cave's center is empty, but it's a world-gate--they need space at the heart. If you walk the right paths to the center, you can find anywhere, anywhen, anyone!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Carvings: My housemate Alder brought home a book--James Houston's Ghost Paddle, about a dream of a carved magic paddle. Haven't read yet, don't know the details. But full of totempoles and woodcarvings.
• Cavern-transporter: felt like Andre Norton's books--Lord of Thunder, or Storm over Warlock or Ordeal in Otherwhere--her books are full of underworld journeys to such caverns whose alien transport technology is indistinguishable from magic. To me they always felt like physical metaphors for the mental/spiritual clearing-out and centering needed so one can rise and roam spirit worlds. What us dreamworkers do--or try to.
• A round domed tribal cavern, empty in the heart: I've had a series of recent dreams using such images to describe my friend Emily Joy! She's a shamanic dreamer constantly crossing world-boundaries, and tries to keep a clear empty space in her center--a gate for otherness to come through.
• Three zodiacs, unclear on Mayan zodiac: three traditions needed to orient yourself as a shaman? One isn't enough. For Em, or for any dreamer? To fully use dream power, do you have to step past your birth-culture?
• Sketching dreams, Cheryl criticizes: my pencil sketches illustrating Burn the Eggs yesterday. Why'd Cheryl put them down? She's been very critical lately, but...
• ACTION:
  1: Keep track of my own center... which is what? Roaming dreamworlds! Focus on the discipline and character-structure needed to keep exploring: calm emptiness. Space and silence. Not relationship dramas!
  2: Send this to Emily when I finish drawing and writing it. Because the dream hints she's the same. We're not people, we're doorways. Needing to be kept clear--so we can open.

The image of forgetting the Mayan zodiac may be literal: I researched the old Mayan zodiac and found the details are lost--the Spanish burnt all the books, killed the priests. Can't be sure the modern Maya have the same zodiac, centuries after the Conquest. The Peccary (wild pig) and Scorpion are mentioned in carvings, but the rest... I portray some animals associated with the area: the jaguar, the alligator, the murex snail (milked to get a rich red/purple dye; akin to Tyrian purple), the quetzal, the feathered serpent...

A MONTH LATER

Both Emily and Cheryl are so uncomfortable with the nightmare Burn the Eggs, feel it violates their privacy, and ask me to pull it from the World Dream Bank. Reluctantly I do. Feel angry, discouraged.

Can't finish the drawing either--sketched it out, but I can't fill it in, shade it, color it. Let it sit...

Emily and Cheryl both broke up with me months ago. After a year of feeling stuck, today I finally sat down and shaded in the dream-picture in a single morning. So I'm putting the whole mess, including Burn the Eggs, back up. I've learned two lessons:

Stay empty.

And censor your dreams for no one.

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