THAT DAY

I read Through the Woods by Emily Carroll. Wintry fairytales done as loose comix/picturestories, in watercolor/gouache--contrasty, simple, effective. But every tale's grim. And misandric--basically "Girls, protect yourselves, men are all monsters. One slip and they'll have you. Don't slip? They may get you still." Emily's a men-are-shits lesbian and it really shows.

Though I read the story about worms--where the sister-in-law's the monster (literally; she's a worm colony) with a certain identification. Having what appears to be an extremely persistent Lyme infection (and they're spirochetes--essentially, microscopic worms) slowly eating me alive. While I try to have a life anyway.

THAT NIGHT

A fiddler with a valuable old violin has recurring visions or dreams warning of a hit-and-run driver crushing his violin--and, incidentally, him too, though as a musician he focuses on the violin. We gotta die somehow; could be worse than a single sudden blow. But that violin could live CENTURIES.

After several warnings, he reluctantly sells it to a friend, a player who'll treat it well. Our fiddler takes up guitar instead. But he's still nervous crossing busy streets. Maybe he averted the vision's scenario and it won't happen at all now, but... violin case, guitar case, what if his vision got that detail wrong?

Just in case, he bought an expendable guitar.

Today he's nervously crossing a fourlane highway curving through a deep forest. Sweating, hypervigilant. He sprints across... alive. He walks on Through The Woods... to a campground. Here he meets his friend and his ex-violin. They plan to camp here and jam, here where there's no car-danger. At last he can relax.

Wrong! A car whips round the corner of the dirt campground loop, doing 50 kph--the camp speedlimit is five. Hits the fiddler's friend and the violin, instantly crushing both. And drives on, hit-and-run. Then a whole FLEET of cars roars the OTHER way round the loop, running over the man's body. And the violin. Over and over. To be sure their bones aren't just kindling but toothpicks. To be sure we're not haunted by the spectre of ... violins.

Faintly I hear tentative, embarrassed laughter. An audience uneasily deciding they'd better treat this murder-pun as a joke. Or, more likely, it's laugh track--to force us to treat it as funny.

Well, dear reader? Funny? I think not.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Woods, danger, premonition: Through the Woods by Emily Carroll! I noticed her man-hating, since I grew up facing exactly such prejudice; so the dream removes that layer, exposing a deeper negativity: Carroll's fatalism. Equally toxic, really, this idea that you just can't win. Beautifully done art... in the service of despair.
• Friend killed, not the original fiddler: the dream agrees with Through the Woods's that evil's strong--a whole fleet of drivers are complicit in the murder! But the dream rejects Through the Woods's fatalism. The original fiddler heeds the warnings, ensures his recurrent nightmare can't happen--and he does survive, though with guilt for merely (as it turns out) displacing the curse onto a friend.

NOTE TEN DAYS LATER

• Nightmares of violence are rare for me... but for two weeks around Violin Death they were nonstop! A shooting, an amputee, a guy squashed flat, a mutilated girl, a co-worker's face clawed bone-deep, a woman's memories robbed, a disembodied head. And then, in the waking world, came the San Bernardino mass shooting.
• Violin Death stood out by having a dreamer foresee future violence. No interpretation here; it explicitly shows recurring nightmares as predictive--the plot hinges on that! It's a self-flagging dream. I'm posting it partly to show that after enough dreamwork, your dreams may start saying what they're about! Freud's claim that dreams always disguise the truth and only a Freud can ferret out that truth... is just wrong. Some nights, dreams don't hide a thing, and TELL you so.
• Violent nightmares before a murder: not new to me. I had annual nightmares about a murder I earwitnessed (heard the gunshots outside; I'm glad I didn't see her die)... but I dreamed them two years before, one year before, and one night before--not after, before.
• I don't just dream of violence before it happens! Right after I learned of the San Bernardino massacre, I dreamed a crazy shooter attacked me and a housemate in a way echoing the news reports--a normal aftershock-dream. I'm sure thousands had similar nightmares. It's just that my dreams frequently do register foreshocks too, just as J.W. Dunne's dreams did 100 years ago. He theorized everyone's dreams look equally forward and back. I won't generalize that far, but I do urge readers to look both ways when you're on the Boulevard of Dreams. Yeah, the official signage says "One Way"... but not all traffic obeys the rules.

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