Spontaneous Duck
Dreamed 2010/9/14 by Wayan
THAT DAY
I'm working on Capsica, a model planet exactly halfway between freezing and boiling--averaging 50°C, or 122°F. I turn the globe upside down, work on the Antarctic. Rethink the south shores of the several Caspian-like inland seas around 60° south; despite rainshadows they should be pinker (hotzone grasses), even red (hotzone forests); oases like our own Caspian's south shore.
My sister Althea visits. Play her my new song based on the dream Migrate Through Fire. She loves it. "Strong rhythm and spare words make all the difference." I need a similar metrical skeleton for Secret Thumbs, based on the dream Maelen and Me. Haven't found it yet.
Althea made $5000 selling her pastel art at the Pearl Festival in Portland. Selling consistently now! Bought a house, fixing up now. She plans to sell the back half of the (huge) lot. She suggests that my paintings are powerful but narrative not lyrical. Better for a book or museum, not a living-room wall. I think she's right.
Walk in Golden Gate Park. Take an old stone stair leading to a path that dead-ends inside a chainlink fence at the Lily Pond. Some groundskeeper yells at us. Have to backtrack. Curious! I rarely get lost, but around my sister I often do. Baffling, but consistent. Like she jams my navigation.
Academy of Science. Wander the aquarium, then the rainforest dome, full of butterflies. Whistle at a bored lonely macaw. It goes crazy looking for the other bird. Just wrong of me I know.
Burma Superstar for lunch. Great food, but my real hunger's for the girls chatting at the next table who I can't talk to. Sigh...
Althea leaves at last for Santa Cruz. I sit down & list all the things I want but procrastinate on:
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THAT NIGHT
1: Witch Ditch
Walking, I nearly fall into a strange ditch a meter wide and deep, lined with cloth padding. In it, hidden, a teenage witch is tutoring a younger girl. Their current exercise requires crawling and grappling while arching your back. They have roughly matching tank tops and pants--red, orange, maroon, magenta. Strange for a school uniform. Camouflage? The quilted ditch is a patchwork of the same colors.
I lie on the brink of the gulch and peer over with one eye. Feel shy about looming over them, but equally shy about sliding down uninvited into their, um, slit... that feels a bit pushy!
Looks catlike, sexy, a turn-on just to watch. The tutor explains "the exercise is magical and focused on the doer, not sexual and on the viewer." I feel a bit dirty for finding the teacher sexy--and REALLY guilty for being equally charmed by her little student. Pervert!
But they both have such wonderful witchy auras! Is it sex tugging at me, or magic?
For a minute I consider saying "snoop!" I'm caught between guilt and excitement and plain social fatigue--too much today! It's all I can do to watch. But I say "play". I like her, and common sense says "don't waste the chance to meet other witches!"
2: Telekinetic Balloon
The tutor lets me join. For the next exercise, she leads us into a kitchen. We sit at the counter and she passes me a balloon. I blow it up.
"Your assignment: you two have to volley this balloon back and forth... not with your hands, or your breath, but your minds."
"Why a balloon?" I ask.
"It's big and visible, but very light; less than a gram. An easy target for novice telekinetics, with your wimpy mental muscles."
The balloon wobbles all over the kitchen. We do seem to tug it some with our minds, but little breezes make it so wayward we don't get much useful feedback. Try quite a while, but it's too erratic to know what's us, what's chance. Noisy data!
To detect subtle effects, you need controlled conditions. There's a reason witches sought caves and solitary huts...
Also, I'm practicing witchcraft distracted--at least as unwise as driving distracted. The distraction: a couple of graphic novels about magic, on the counter. Two rival interpretations of the same classic story, one designed to teach magic. A witch tutorial!
Both versions open the same--with a splash page of a tiny figure on a crag--a tall lozenge of black stone. Similar color schemes and layouts, yet quite different cartoonists. But both are pros, and sensed this was the strongest opening. Masters converge!
I read one version straight through...
3: The Cripple, or, Spontaneous Duck
Our witchy scripture's set in a world where magic's routine. No need for roads or cars, since people levitate--normally. But where does that leave the abnormal? We follow a family with two sons, one normal, one crippled--not visibly, not physically at all--it's his magic that limps. He's not the witch he should be; he's only human. In a world not built for humanity.
Mom kisses both sons goodbye at the kitchen door, and they step into the meadow and fly off to school. But the normal sibling hurries ahead, embarrassed by his brother's clumsy flight; doesn't want to be seen with a boy who still needs a levitation-talisman. At his age! Shameful.
It's not just that our cripple flies slowly, with a prosthetic spell. He can't transform reliably, as a witch should--he often does shapeshift, but spontaneously, uncontrollably, and can't quickly revert. A very public, humiliating affliction--like epilepsy on Earth. No wonder his brother's reluctant to be seen with him.
As the cripple rises ponderous as a balloon over the meadow, it happens--he suddenly thrashes mid-air and becomes... a huge cartoon duck! Donald Duck? As he swears, he sure SOUNDS like Donald...
Sheesh. What's this dream saying? Another lesson in witchcraft that I don't quite get.
NOTES IN THE MORNING
NINE YEARS LATER
Now I think having duck-fits was a warning of two problems I neglected back then. I saw myself as "a little geeky" rather than clinically autistic. Wrong. My autism's pretty severe. I just rarely melt down because I rest (not needing a day job) and withdraw a lot (having a safe retreat to withdraw to), and know what foods and chemicals trigger problems. I often got three-day fevers, chills and "migraines"--sometimes with no known trigger, just like that boy inexplicably became Donald Duck. Social life is hard when you HAVE to "duck out" of many commitments. Today I'm better--down to one-day fevers and milder headaches--but it ain't gone.
The dream's hint I'd spend a year or two split turned out to be true. For the next year, I worked as executor of my mom's complex estate, plowing through endless papers, learning tax laws and ethical investment. Trapped in the mundane! But that paid off--in two years I went from broke to rich. I still feel a magical/spiritual inadequacy, but at least, with money woes gone, I have the time to work on that list of put-off projects! Note how many are now active links--and I'm working hard on the rest.
One disability at a time! Small exercises...
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