Dream 1
I was with my little brother. It was night. we were in a clearing in a wooded area with a few trailer homes or cabins and some picnic tables. I had a thick book which I had written by hand.
My brother asked me to show him some of the stuff in the book. I didn't want to show him any of what I had written, but I thought of a drawing I could show him. I told him about it as I saw it in my head. A woman had been pursued by some creepy people. Now they had lured her to their place, where they would kill her. But the were even going to kill her in a manipulative, unsuspecting way.
I flipped through the pages but couldn't find the picture. My brother walked away to take care of some business. Finally I found the page. There were actually four panels of drawings, like it was a black and white comic book page.
I hadn't realized how fine and professional my drawing style had been for these panels. They looked like Aubrey Beardsley, even though my own subject matter was trite and over-sexualized, pretty much falling in line with the contemporary comic book style.
The woman had been lured by other women, to whom she was attracted, to an orgy in the dining hall of a mansion. She was aroused when she watched the orgy's participants killing each other.
I myself felt hands pressing into my spine. I though, Oh -- that's how they killed me! They actually bit my spine out!
The last panel, the one I wanted to show my brother, was of the orgiasts pulling the girl down into the orgy. Now she didn't want to go.
I got all of this in an instant -- almost as soon as I found the page I had unintentionally -- automatically -- flipped past it, to the end of the book.
The last pages were all beautifully designed crosses, mostly ornamented, with pagan symbols, and all drawn in pen, much finer than how I usually draw. One cross was grey with black stripes going up it. Another was white, with wrappings around its lower extension like the snakes around the medical symbol. They were all set against beautifully cross-hatched black backgrounds.
I was so excited by all the drawings I saw that I ran after my brother to show him. I met him coming out of a cabin. He said, "If you don't want to show me the stuff you make, just say so. I'd like to see it, but itn's not a big deal."
I said, "No, no. I do want to show you."
We walked past a cabin with the lights on. It looked like a workshop inside. There were two black girls inside, flirting with each other. They looked over at us, somehow implying in their expression that we were perverts for looking at them while they were flirting.
My brother said, "Why is their hair all huge like that? That's a stupid style."
We were now back at the table. I tried to show my brother the drawings I liked, but, flipping backwards from the very end of the book, I couldn't find them: not the crosses, not the comic book page. I was trying to remember where I had seen the drawings. But I couldn't.
Dream 2
I was watching some special about Elvis Presley. Elvis wore a black leather jacket and tight, black jeans. He turned around and pulled down his pants to show people the strange thing about his asshole. The jeans stuffed against his buttocks as he pulled his pants down. Finally he got to his asshole, which was some strange, fleshy trunk, like a piece of intestine had been pulled out his ass. It was milky, filmy, slimy, and translucent.
Elvis now changed somehow, like he was some average guy in prison as well as Elvis. He said, "I always tell people, don't take the grate off the toilet, because my asshole is so weird that if the grate is off the toilet I can't get the correct angle."
I saw the "grate," a patch of chain link fence. I knew that Elvis had to shit so that his shit could come out parallel to the ground and then go into the toilet. I didn't know how the fence would make the angle of a toilet perpendicular to its usual angle.
Elvis now stood with his back to a fence and began shitting through the fence.
Dream 3
I was on an Ancient Egyptian temple with a group of soldiers. This was Ancient Egypt, but it was all indoors. Sunlight came in through clerestory windows.
We were combating an enemy that far outnumbered us. But this temple held a secret that would give us invincibility. The temple had three levels, each constructed at different periods in Ancient Egypt's history.
One level's door had to be entered in order to start an avalanche on another level, blocking that level's door and releasing the key to the secret on the remaining level. The first choice, if incorrect, would lead to death.
We had to find the secret before the enemy approached. They could come straight to us and kill us. But they could approach as we opened the secret and hurry into the door and take the invincibility for themselves.
I had a paper (it looked like from Renaissance Italy) that was written in a symbolic riddle-language. Its writing corresponded with "writing" on a fan-shaped store over the second door. The door was actually drawn on the paper.
Comparing the "writing" patterns and the riddle-language, I figured out the correct door to enter. I called the men to enter the top level door first. It was right above us, somehow easily accessible, but for some reason we were running.
Now we were running toward the temple, as if we hadn't just been there. We ran over huge, randomly stacked, limestone cubes. As we ran, the indoor "Ancient Egypt" landscape became ore and more what I called a museum, though it was actually more like a department store's clothing section full of almost barren racks and clothing display tables and spaced with cubic limestone structures and ancient relics.
As I ran I called to the men, "Go! Go! We're almost there!" But soon I was passed up by the men, and a huge man, wearing Egyptian costume but looking more like a Viking, took my place and role of shouting to the men.
I was quickly losing my breath. I wore modern clothes. I had a shoulder-strap briefcase-bag which bounced against my stomach and was full of small, limestone cubes. The men kept passing me. We, but especially they, went at a furious pace.
I broke down. My lungs were burning. Yet I kept calling, in a progressively meeker tone, "Go! Go!" as if I were still the leader.
They were now all so far ahead of me that I wondered why they'd let me come with them and why they'd tolerated my pretending like I was the boss. I could barely even climb the limestone blocks.
The soldiers had vanished now. I got to the "temple," which was just a mock-up of the temple we'd been at before. It stood on an island of green carpet and faced a stand of almost barren clothes racks and tables. There was a tile walkway and then another island of deep jade carpet.
A group of thirty or so high school kids walked past. A boy stopped with his girl at a little square formed by the back end of the "temple" and a few other tall walls or divides. The place was still a "museum."
The boy, black, with a light complexion, showed his black girlfriend the only thing in this square: a board on the back wall. It was maybe ten feet up and was maybe ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide. it was black plastic and faced with a shiny sheet of clear plastic. it was like a sign filled with light-up numbers to let you know when your turn has come up, like at the DMV. But the board had a statement on it. The statement was obscured. almost none of the words were lit, and the shiny, wavy plastic front obscured the letters.
The boy said, "Everything else in this place is bullshit. This is the only thing that matters."
I was so weak by the time I had arrived here that I was heaving, barely breathing. I knelt down beside the kids. I remembered the boy now. He had once punched me in the face. It hadn't been while I was drunk. It had been while I was sober. I couldn't remember the exact event. But I knew now that it had happened. Throughout the rest of the dream I struggled to remember this event.
Now my main focus was on reading the sign. But I couldn't get it.
The boy was annoyed by my presence. He was being a loud asshole to get me to leave.
All I could decipher from the sign was toward the end of the long statement. It went: "The country of XXXXX is the only place where a black man can say the word 'Haewan,' his own word for God..."
Now the boy was so furious about my presence that he swung his arms violently around my head. Finally, unintentionally, he hit me just forward of my left temple, just about the bony corner above my left eye.
I had been trying to place the statement with Malcolm X when the boy hit me. I was more annoyed than angry, but I wanted the kids to leave. I stood and pushed the kid away and snapped, "Leave me alone!"
The kid was a lot smaller than I'd thought he'd be. I couldn't remember him and he couldn't remember me. But something about me startled him. He took his girl and ran off.
I knelt again to read the sign. I may have been copying it in a notepad. The place was by now almost entirely an almost barren clothing section in a department store.
I thought the sign would say that only in XXXXX was a black man allowed to worship the god of his own personal heritage, and that black men should be free to worship in their own way all over the world, especially in America, where the black heritage was so hideously erased from the slaves' lives.
But instead the sign said something like, "Black men have no god. They never had one. They never had a god or a conception of Heaven. They were always about themselves, about getting theirs, and having more than anybody else had. God and Heaven were the conceptions of the white man. But each black man naturally grows up selfish and spiteful, as he should.
"The country of XXXXX is the only country where a black man can say the word 'Haewan,' his own word for God and Heaven, and where the men there will tell him he is a fool for believing in such things."
I went from thinking this was a beautiful statement by Malcolm X to wondering who on earth would write this strange statement and why on earth a black man would think it was a good statement, the only statement worth appreciating in (what used to be) a great museum.
My mom was now to my right. I was telling her all this.
I looked below the sign. There were three plaques, grey, coppery metal, each with the name of a person who had created this statement. The top plaque had a name like Alexander. The man's profession, drug-dealer, was written below the name. The plaque below that had a name and a profession like drug-dealer/pimp. I didn't read the lowest plaque.
I told my mom, "These people only want money. They want to destroy everything, even themselves. It's a sickness they infect humanity with. They want people to become stupid savages. To forget God. And something in the universe is letting them win."
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