WAYAN'S DREAM

I'm a cat-person in Marin County, padding up a trail, heading for Drakes Bay out on Point Reyes.

As I step off the North American plate, over the San Andreas Fault onto the Pacific Plate (slowly grinding north--Point Reyes is a wedge of Southern California dragged away from the palms toward the redwoods) I sense all is different here. Not just different from the rest of California--the vegetation's mossy and feathery but quite unlike the equally moist Northwest rainforests. An ecological island. I think I prefer it.

I pass the Backward Falls. Yes, they fall up. Plate boundaries do funny things to streambeds.

I climb a thin ridge, as steep as the wet side of a Hawaiian island. The rain here seems to fall more on the inland side though. I reach the top of the knifelike ridge and see the town spreading below, down to the sea. This slope's drier, just chaparral dotted with oaks. But the soil's stony shale, and hurts my bare feet (human shoes don't fit).

I sit on the pass, with my synth in my lap. Play quietly and rest. I'm no great player--stubby paws. Thanks, ancestors! Oh well, at least I have opposable thumbs.

I feel a bit unsteady--am I on an overhang? I slowly creep back from the edge and part of it breaks away! Shale weakened by the Fault. I carve a step to one side and try to lay the synth on firm(ish) ground so I can scramble with all four paws--a long nervous struggle. Finally I make it safely.

I meet a fellow explorer, who's an old friend & lover: Silky. She's carrying a harpoon gun that fires yellow glass wedges designed to sink into rocks and trail an invisible monofilament line strong enough to hold our weight. With it she can climb like Spiderman! Alongside Silky, I feel safer climbing around.

We hike down to the shore. On a coastal cliff, we meet some Natives. Not cats, but deer people with reddish pelts, often white-spotted. They're fascinated by Silky's speargun and yellow-wedge arrows and climbing-lines. They beg her to help them out. They want to build a bridge out to a treetopped sea-stack at least 100 yards out. It's an impossible shot with a handheld speargun, but Silky quiets herself, breathes out...

...and makes it!

The Deer People cheer. "Now we can build a gossamer footbridge!" Has to be discreet, though, all woven of transparent line, or Humans will spot it and cover the islet with their broken glass, plastic and cigarette butts. So it'll be just a minimal ghost of a bridge, and they'll only sidle over to visit the isle after dark...

A sight I soon hope to see. Moonlit deer above the shimmering sea...

NOTES

• The Backward Falls: probably Alamere Falls in southern Point Reyes, dropping straight into the sea--or beach at low tide.
• Cliff, near-fall, my fears: unlike the stable granite of the Sierra Nevada, California's coastal cliffs are shale fractured by the San Andreas Fault. Hikers think they're on solid rock but slides are common. (No, California's not falling into the sea; for millions of years, this coast's been rising.)
• The Deer People: weren't native mule deer, but reddish with spots--probably Axis deer, a Central Asian species brought to Point Reyes a century ago, reddish but keeping a fawn's white spots into adulthood. They're very shy, so if they sidled over a gossamer bridge to a secret isle, they'd only dare it at night.
• Big rounded golden darts: like the setting crescent moon. Echoes here of Artemis--though the Greeks saw the crescent moon as her bow, not her arrow.
• Gossamer bridge: the delicate memory-traces of dreams, taking time, patience and quiet to recall & write. Most humans lack the patience--or free time--for serious dreamwork. I deliberately took a pay cut, working only part-time, to leave my mornings free. Worth it for the cat-archers and magical deer-bridges... literal moonlighting!
• The deer only forage the isle secretly at night: is this dream about dreamwork itself? It may warn "Shut up about shamanic powers available to the serious dreamworker." As vulnerable to exploitation by the crass as any other resource, I guess--just go to any New Age shamanic workshop. Better, don't.
• The mer-wolves watching: in the dream I just saw heads watching from the water--in the dim light I couldn't see what. Seals or otters seem more likely, but as I drew, Wasco the Sea-Wolf appeared, even though Wasco's more of a Northwest Coast figure--Oregon, Washington, BC.

I write the dream text and most of the notes above, charmed by the images, but baffled where they came from. Then my housemate Liz comes home. She tells me what she was up to last night:

LIZ'S DREAM

"I hiked across country, crossed a creek, then along a trail atop sea-cliffs. But I feared I'd fall..."

In recent decades a lot of dream researchers dismiss the very notion of ESP out of hand, vilifying anyone who "believes" in it as superstitious. But I don't believe; I know, from long, first-hand experience. Data beats theory! Sure, a parallel like Liz's is doubtable in isolation, but it's not alone.

And neither are we. You think by day you're an island--the cat who walks alone. But gossamer bridges, invisible by day, link us by night.

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