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The Unicorn Mask of Ignorability

Dreamed 2009/10/13 by Wayan

I walk the labyrinthine home where I grew up. Why do I live the maze again? Am I growing down? I don my childhood unicorn mask of ignorability. The charm still works! So I listen in: muttered arguments among engineer-priests in antique robes who stroll the halls of home with hieroglyphic scrolls. Planning pyramid, temple, tomb? What for? For whom?

Strangers' debris salts my old room. Some hardback Chinese classics. Scattered shattered statues on melancholy, dwindled shelves. Grief of the broken. Where to hide my unicorn mask-- buried in the closet? If these builderpriests see my horn, they'll counterspell. And I need to eavesdrop, still invisible a while. I must be a forgotten beast until all their secrets spill.

NOTES AND GUESSES

• Weird engineers, hieroglyphics:
  1. Solar-panel installers tromped through our house this week. Priests of the new sun-cult!
  2. I just visited my friend Patagia's house, full of books on ancient Egypt.
• Their plans: recent dreams have similar figures. Dunno what they mean, but this dream clarifies their plans are ambitious and longterm.
• Eavesdrop on the invaders:
  1. Yesterday as I wrote my dreams, two friends invaded my room to talk to me, then stayed to talk to each other! I listened politely rather than boot them out so I could write.
  2. I've had a baffling illness the last few years. Is my immune system still trying to identify the invaders?
• Debris: this week my room's full of junk others brought in for me to sort through. I want to toss it!
• Broken sad statues: one of my dream-sculptures is broken, awaits mending; and three more unfinished figurines gather dust.
• Shelves shrunk, but not their support brackets: a pun. Shelf-support! I support myself but my self's too small. Lack ambition?
• Ignorability: with the mask on, I was visible but they all looked right past. Sounds like I sabotage publicity for my art, because I still need obscurity, til I figure something out. But what?
• Animal mask: Egyptian gods are animal-headed, so I'm donning the aspect of a god. But unicorns aren't Egyptian--an outsider god.
• Unicorn:
  1. Celibacy/horniness? After a big romantic drama exhausted me last year, I haven't been dating or even looking hard.
  2. Healing? Unicorns were healers; is dream-me my immune system, trying to get a lock on invading disease organisms (West Nile virus?)
  3. Impossibility? Peter S. Beagle's Last Unicorn found most people saw her as an ordinary mare; they would not see her impossible horn. I've experienced ignorability; as a child prodigy, I met adults who just went blind or deaf when I said or did the impossible.
• "Forgotten beast": in Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Sybel grows up orphaned, managing a zoo for orphaned myths. She barely sees herself as human till she must shelter a baby. My unicorn mask is like Sybel's alienation. But mine's deliberate--removable! Encouraging.
• ACTION:
  1. Finish those sculptures!
  2. Defend my personal time and space--for dreamwork and otherwise.
  3. Get tested for West Nile virus. You never know.
  4. Be patient with anonymity. I'm choosing to wear the mask of an outsider for a reason, even if my conscious doesn't get it. Plan long.
• This is Dreamverse #59. Each week, a dream-poem. Next: Aquarina Prodigy.

A NOTE ONE YEAR LATER

The dream looks more predictive now than symbolic. A few months after it, my mom died suddenly. I turned glum and silent. As I write, our childhood home is being sold. Buyers and realtors wander the empty rooms, planning architectural makeovers... as sixty years of family history evaporates.

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