THAT DAY

Off to the Fringe Festival! First: The Children's Museum. A religious nut bullies his kids. Charlotte flees, gets a degree in astrophysics, denies her past, says Lucy's dead. Not! Lucy stays. Dad molests her. A stillborn child. Dad goes to Iraq to find the pillar of fire he's seen in visions. Yep, there it is... a burning oil well. Returns home burned, his faith gutted. Kills himself. Lucy can't bear to touch him, leaves the body there... ugh. I still sympathize more with Lucy. Unwise to stay but at least she doesn't deny her sister's existence.

Next... Frisco Fred's Cabaret. A supposedly comic juggler, then a quiet mentalist, then a puppeteer who really needs a writer, then a loud and manipulative magician who makes me feel mauled.

My girlfriend Cheryl feels sick. Not from the abuse scenes, or the loud magician--from the mind-reader. Says he wasn't just doing stage magic but really trying to send images. She felt like he was screaming in her ears. She feels shaky. Wow, someone with stronger ESP (and weaker boundaries) than ME!

My housemate Alder basically orders both of us to rest and eat. Cheryl's drained. But finds nothing edible in our fridge. Corner store. Vegs. I cook her soup. Slowly she recovers. Says "I used to tough out stuff like that but now... I just... can't."

Dream 1: WOLVES AT THE PARTY

A warm evening in Southern California. All the women at this party wear variations on the classic little black dress, showing off their tan legs. Sexy, but they all feel like they're not for me--cute, but just not my species. Bold, but sort of flat--like movie images. What dimension's missing?

Though the war with the wolves is over, all the humans shun the few grinning, wolfish aliens who crashed the party. But I gravitate to them. Talk to one--no, more than talk--I try taking on their wolfish energy-configuration, and sense the scene as they do.

It works! Decent vision but more acute smell and hearing. The shift in sensory priorities is significant, but what really disorients me is their social sense--sharply aware how each individual feels--toward wolves at least. (Mixed, by the way; despite the war, not all humans are totally closed-minded.)

Odd to see humans filtered through wolf-sensibilities. Wolves are even more pack-sensitive than humans: see both humans and wolves as pack-critters whose social games are about who's in your pack and/or what status you have inside it. I'm not like that--tend to see individuals as such, ignoring status. I find their obsession with pecking order quite stifling.

Complicating my picture of the party through wolf eyes, the party's winding down and I have to pay the house band. There's a house fund, so cash isn't the problem, but... just to talk to the bandleader, I have to come partway back to human thinking, and it's a LONG hike!

But worth it. They're Hawaiians, playing slack-key guitar. These human musicians all find the aliens fascinating; a whole new species-viewpoint on sound!

So to encourage people to talk with the wolves, they opened and closed with a Hawaiian folk song on the introduction of cats to the islands. For a generation they were worshiped, just as they were in Egypt. "Still kinda sacred" says the bandleader.

"Why?" I mean, I worship cats, but...

"Dey outside dat pack-thinkin'; cats meetcha one-on-one, you know, indivigil, treat YOU indivigil. Help you see ya own feeling..." Ah. Peel off our own human pack-mentality. "Dese alien wolf sharp, o' course, sharper dan dese party boys; but dey don' see indivigil like cat."

Of course few of the party-goers got the song at all. Most didn't even hear it. Live music's just a background to the real business of a party: seeking sex and profit and status within the human pack.

"Oh well" shrugs the Hawaiian bandleader. "Sometime music up, sometime down, sometime poetry up, sometime down. Tonight, poetry down. Like wolf down." Poetry as in song lyrics? Yeah, the humans just weren't listening. On the other hand, though English is an alien language for them, the wolves listened closely to that song!

The bandleader adds, gesturing at the humans, "Tonight, dey don' wa look how dey see animal. An' dey see alien as animal, not people. Not yet. Look doggy, is doggy!"

Yep, I'm afraid so. At least tonight.

Dream 2: THROUGH THE WIRES

A curious energy-being has been observing my path through the material world the way a wildlife researcher follows a tagged lion, or a biologist times a rat in a maze. It's puzzled--can't see why I don't speed straight for my goal. I have to explain how my latest pauses were me skirting some cows in a field, then climbing through a barb-wire fence.

I start by defining cows as "lumps that can travel by distorting four projections beneath them." That's uncanny to this energy being, who has only seen large ojects like planets and stars: relatively stable in shape, though sometimes compressible. Cows shapeshift! Who knew? For simplicity, I don't explain such concepts as life or awareness; cows as just big moving lumps, never mind why.

"On the other hand, MY body is a lump that can shapeshift all over, and can thus go through a barrier impenetrable to cows because it's built to handle shifts past their limits. But to do it, I have to shapeshift repeatedly, about half a dozen major shapes in the right sequence, to get through without pain and injury. It's not just one shift. So I slowed. I had to."

One thing passing through another! The energy being does understand that of course--and, being educated, recognizes how much more difficult this is in the material world than its own. After all, relative solidity is the defining characteristic of matter!

So the being calms down. Patience! It doesn't know the local conditions; I do.

All in all, I'm pleased. Not every shaman can translate our material conundrums into energy-being terms...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Party-goers sexy but not my crowd: the playgoers at the Fringe.
• Talking wolves: in that puppet show, a wolf talked of dogs, cats, humans; verged on real insight but always turned away to crack a joke. We can't have thought adulterating our patter! This is the Fringe!
• Energy being: Sarah. Me too. Patience! We're both impractical intuitives who barely understand having bodies at all...

TEN YEARS LATER

At the time, I thought of myself (and Cheryl) as "psychic, thin-skinned, rather geeky". Today it's clear that I'm well past the threshold of autism; several factors had merely masked how severe I really am.

1. IQ 170-200; sheer memory and reasoning speed let me skirt some social problems, and hide (even from me) how much I'm guessing... and passing. How much work it all is.
2. Dietary and behavioral restrictions--no gluten, no allergens, lots of solitude, natural light, heavy supplements. My protocol avoids perceptual or metabolic overload.
3. Dreamwork itself. After 30,000 bizarre dreams, I no longer expect normality. Or to pass as normal myself.

I now think the contrast between these two dreams was trying to warn me just how wide that gulf was. Is.

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