I'm driving near Livermore, California. I'm uneasy--the car ahead dawdles and hogs the road, won't pull over to let us all pass. It's full of teenage boys kissing and groping each other, radiating smugness. They point out their windows at me and sneer. Huh? For being straight, ugly, what?

Now my sister Miriel's driving us through Oakland--no, Albany. One of the few shoreline hills in the East Bay. As the moist air from the Golden Gate hits that rise, it creates a misty, humid little terrarium a mile long. So humid, the trees create lenticular standing clouds over them. Weird sight.

Even now in January, it's mild. Pass dunes where teenage girls lie sunning--well, misting--the sky is white, the sun a bright blur. They're in sexy swimsuits, cut high-thigh, in metallic colors.

Above, dunes hulk. Steep, right at the angle of repose... not for sand, for salt! Coarse-crystal salt. Spills onto the highway in spots, and plummets steep into the sea. This is a state park...

More girls flock by in metallic little suits--tweens, not even teens, yet with knowing adult looks. They WANT me to lust after them--for money, attention or status among peers. It's not like I'm a real person. Not as mean about it as those boys, but...

Well... sort of true. I am attracted to her. More forbidden fruit, more guilt...

But I'm also just chilled and shivering. In the cold wind of reality. Unwanted.

Miriel takes an inland route, by a poisonous hotspring lake... Bubbles and steam. Volcanic vents? What minerals are in that water? Alkali? Acid as in that Indonesian crater? Or just metal salts--copper, mercury, sulfur, who knows what?

A ranger points out mutant plants and animals in the lake. Huge fronds moving, groping. Plants here all move. Creepy.

Now the lakebed is a museum display floor. We walk down into the bed. Mockups of huge planktony things flailing, groping, wriggling. Plated, segmented, abstract sculptures. Magnified this much, they're not really recognizable as animals at all.

Here on the lakebed, I run into an unpopular friend of mine, Mithran, who's a wizard into alchemy--early chemistry. His colleagues see him as cold, secretive, a snob. In fact they call him Mithran the Cold. But other academics here won't study the background of his discoveries. Too radical a break--too advanced for them to grasp.

One asks me irritably "Why does he tell YOU his secrets and not US?"

I have to hold back from snapping "Because I gave his research a fair hearing and you DON'T."

I don't say it. It's not the whole truth. Mithran's standoffish because... he's already disproven several key Church doctrines. They'd burn him if they knew. Better they think him cold, and shun him, and don't read his work.

Even my advisor, Jade, a liberal here, thinks he's a just a crank. Hasn't studied his research--hasn't done her homework!

Yet Mithran's analyzed what poisoned that lake. Acidic water, limestone and alkali mix there, forming mineral salts that precipitate out and build the dunes. It's an elegant, clear analysis proving his basic alchemical theory is sound. But to his colleagues, his proof'd be meaningless; they lack even a crude general theory of acids, bases and salts. Lost in detail, they're blind to the laws under the surface.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The dream brings up three kinds of taboo sex: gay teenage boys, then tweenage girls, then sibling incest. The inclusion of the boys show me the dream's talking not of my hidden desires but about my fears. Of mockery, of others' condemnation, of persecution if I show any sexual feelings at all. Learned to hide as a kid; I was shunned, spat on and beaten by my so-called peers. Who, no matter how many grades I got skipped ahead... weren't peers. Nothing in common.
• Weird trees, forbidden (sexual) fruit: echoes the myth of Eden and the tree of forbidden knowledge.
• Why the play on "precipitation"? The trees create lenticular clouds that drop rain feeding the trees. The salt forming the dunes precipitates from mineral-saturated water). The same word applies to both! Weird.
• Dissing research you haven't even read: my friend Jade did this recently--first nagged me to go with her to hear R.D. Laing talk, then mocked him for researching psychic dreams. But his actual findings paralleled my own dreamwork! So even Jade (a former hippie) finds my current research nonsense. Sigh!
• Wizard called Mithran: in Patricia Mckillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Mithran is a cold clever wizard paid by a king to zombify Sybel into a smiling, passive wife. [Plot spoiler: bad choice of victim.] But of course the name Mithran is McKillip's tribute to Tolkien: Gandalf's elvish nickname is Mithrandir, "Gray Pilgrim". He's a wizard famously "subtle and quick to anger", whose bluntness to the powerful made his name mud in the courts of Gondor and Rohan. But a smidgen more ethical than McKillip's wizard-pimp-lobotomist!
• The point here is that the dream chose a name implying magic/ESP, solitude, intelligence, and emotional reserve, while leaving his ethics ambiguous. And the dream shows why Mithran(dir) might be reserved: his peers aren't his peers. They haven't done their homework. Pearls before swine.

After writing the dream, I go to work at the library. I notice a book of Margaret Atwood's I haven't read: Bluebeard's Egg. A collection of dark fairytales. Open it at random and try "The Salt Garden." Supersaturation, a contaminated lake, dunes, a wizard, fears of a holocaust, and a transgressive sexual pentangle with her in the middle.

It closes with an apocalyptic vision of the bombs falling to end us all (yes yes dystopia will save us from having any fun in bed, we get the message O Handmaid Margaret), but a sort of life will replace us--supersaturated brine precipitates weird coraline trees, lifeless yet growing...

I dreamed of salt-dunes dropping into supersaturated brine, transgressive girls in fish-scale-bright swimsuits, and twisted trees precipitating clouds out of supersaturated air, by poisoned waters...

I'm not hinting this is more than coincidence. I'm saying so, flatly. These aren't common images. It's a cluster unique to two texts: Atwood's story, and my dream-journal, written the night before I opened her book. At random.

No, what I wonder about is quite different. All that white glare and mist in my dream, that I struggled so hard to see through, may be the dream's way to say I'm looking not into my toxic past (again, again, again) but (with effort) into the future; not just predictive but aware it's predictive and trying to tell me so.

Reject that as nonsense? You haven't done your homework. Pearls before swine.

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