My recurring fever... recurs. Every few weeks for a whole year now, since I first got it right after Burning Man. And still no diagnosis.

I lie around reading Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze: Sacrifice, the story of Iphigenia--her dad Agamemnon kills her to get a favorable wind for the fleet attacking Troy. At first, it's a bit flat--all those bearded, patriarchal, callous men. But it slowly builds; Iphigenia turns downright heroic, and even Agamemnon's not the undiluted swine he first seems. Both are trapped by political forces too big for even kings.

And Odysseus? Troubling and troubled--alarmed by his growing taste for using his cunning to do what even kings can't--shape history.

Shanower's art has a scale and power that justifies his Eisner Award, but I have to remind myself... it's not pure scholarship or art for him. It's a natural labor of love. He loves men, and he picked a project--retelling the entire Iliad--that (by an amazing coincidence) lets him draw all these ripped, athletic gay/bi men!

Me? I want to write about and draw those I find sexy--except my society trivializes women, kids, animals, mythic creatures, the timid and sensitive and shy... everyone who turns me on. And so my art about their lives must be trivial too. Furry, girly, worthless.

Ask any patriarch.

Oh, I work on my art anyway. Can't surrender to society (or other recurring diseases).

A lebbird, native to Lyr

Lyr, a huge sea-world

Slaves Don't Dance, p.14

First Planetocopia--I'm building a huge sea-world, Lyr. Write the Diomedes tour, adjusting map details...

Next I email some permission-requests to furry artists online whose creatures I used as bases for my illustrations of local peoples and creatures. Not a warrior or butch in the bunch...

Then I work on dream-comics. Color Page 14 of Slaves Don't Dance. Slow, slow, the slowest cartoonist on Earth...

And of course trivial. Don't forget trivial.

I'm walking slowly up a quiet, winding residential street in the Berkeley hills. Took a bus, now walking the last few blocks to... what? What am I here for? Blank.

Walk three meters behind a girl who keeps taking all the exact same turns I do. Are we going to the same event? I'm too shy to ask her, yet worry I'm scaring her by "following" her silently, though I'm not. Still utterly sure I must go turn here, go that way, turn there. But no idea what our goal is.

Three men are doing the same to me, following me ten feet back. But they're not silent. Talk about "that weird old man".

For blocks, I don't connect this with me. When I do, I feel scared and hurt. Glance at them. They have disturbing auras, especially the leader. (Yes, I sense auras.) I don't know what that color/shape/scent means, but it scares me.

I start climbing a fence. They follow.

Climb the stone wall of a house. They follow.

At last I summon my dream-strength and kick off into the air, flying clumsily... but flying.

Damn. They can fly too. They follow.

They never attack me, just dogging me, staying ten feet back...

Then... their masks peel away. Their true selves are revealed.

They're still male, but younger now. A teenage gang. They carry packs bristling with picks, trowels, brushes, lenses...

Oh, no! They're... Teen Archeologists! I feel a rush of terror. As anyone would.

Then those masks slip. That too was a cover. Their TRUE true selves are...

Not even human. Shapeshifters, just passing. They relax into mere blurs of pure awareness, and tell me, casual and blunt, why they hound me.

"We're guards. We've been monitoring your dreams for years." Their job's to counter a dream entity--a being, or a force?--that's recurred a lot in my dreams, puzzling me. "We contain it. Can't let it go too far!"

Friends or foes? "Toward you? You're not our business. Oh, you dreamers are always projecting fears onto us, see us as stalkers--or guardian angels. All that's just your human drama.

"Irrelevant to us--our business isn't with YOU, but with that entity. We follow you only because it manifests around you. You're open to it."

In the dream I recalled times I'd met this dream-entity they oppose, and this idea of invasion by the entity (and its three hunters) explains a lot about my recent dreams...

...but when I woke, I forgot what the entity was.

But not how frank they were about it. No Guardians of the Mysteries there! Those guardians don't care what I know. Or not.

I'm not their job.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Tri-guardians: I dreaded them without good reason, so they qualify as Jungian shadow figures. But what's with those layers?
  1. Outer disguise as adult men: The Greek men in Age of Bronze who I disliked and backgrounded; only the few women interested me. Sexist, yes--but just the inverse of my so-called civilization's biases. If I were Jungian, I'd have interpreted the dream as "I walk a woman's path, so shadows of the Masculinity I rejected haunt me." Good thing I'm not a Jungian. (Jung, I like. His followers, wellllll...)
  2. Grumbling I'm a "weird old man", then turning into teenage bone-diggers: See, this is why I'm not Jungian. They never write about the Archetype of the Teen Archeologist, do they, Scooby? But I think I know why they called me old & weird. When I emailed furry artists, asking to use their pictures, I was elaborate and formal--old-fashioned. Because I feared rejection!
  3. Three guardian spooks not concerned with me directly: Note how they provoke me to shamanic feats--fear of them pushes me first to climb, then fly! In shamanic training, illness often forces a shaman to withdraw from normal life, focus on ascent to the spiritworld. So the Three may be a personification of my recurring illness--it's forced me to retreat for months. Or the entity they oppose could be that, and they're here to regulate it: let it isolate me, drive my art or spiritual climb, but not kill me.
• "You attract this dangerous outside entity": a flat warning I have poor defenses. My vulnerability doesn't surprise me. My family background is hippie/pacifist--I'm reluctant to fight, or even see anyone as enemies. But is the warning mystical ("You're vulnerable to possession"), social ("You can't say no") or medical too? Am I so averse to self-defense I suppress my own immune system, open myself to viral or bacterial invasion?
• ACTION: Look through dreams this week--any clues on what these forces are? Don't assume they're psychological, mystical or medical.

YEARS LATER

Five years later, I got a longer, clearer interview: Trenchcoat Angels. And the entity they guarded against did seem to be making me sick, though by that time I was fighting back hard on my own. But none of that came clear at the time. I posted this dream for what was clear soon as I woke: the Tri-Guardians themselves said not all dream-figures are internal, or even concern you. A century of dream-theorists, from Freud to the latest sleep researchers, all assume dream figures are just aspects of you, you, wonderful you...

...except shamans. Primitives who naïvely think dreamworlds are real--and that their natives might have their own agendas.

What if the Tri-Guardians told the plain truth?

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