Dream 1
I walked along a path or road along a mountain slope that went down on my right. I saw some bird or birds fly by in the distance. I was excited because I thought it was a red-tailed hawk. It made me feel better about myself, like previously I had been shunned and made to feel like I couldn't see anything special.
But the view of it was for a moment obscured by pine threes and then for good by a wall or cliff which curled around the edge of the path.
As I approached the edge of the path I saw five big, beautiful, white-pinioned birds in a group and flying toward the "wall." I couldn't tell whether they were hawks or "a less special bird." They were incredible to me.
I called one of my friends (possibly KA, a coworker from my Americorps program in the NYC Parks) to come see, even though the birds were already gone. We stood by the railing waiting for the birds to come by.
Now in the distance was a bird that we knew had to be enormous. It was mostly tail, and it was dark, iridescent-like -- like a homogeneity of metallic speckles of dark rainbow colors on a black background. As we faced it it first flew from right to left until it was out of our sight. It flew from left to right, much closer and larger in appearance.
At some point KA asked me whaat kind of bird it was. I said, "It's the phoenix! It's a bird that -- It's a bird that --" But I couldn't remember what the phoenix did that made it so famous.
To mask my shame I tried to come up with some other fact about the phoenix. I felt like I was, within myself, reducing the greatness of the phoenix to preserve my pride and reduce my feeling of shame over not remembering what the phoenix was famous for. Yet, after I reduced the phoenix's stature in my mind, I hoped it would come closer and renew the feeling of greatness with its massiveness.
Now the tail of the phoenix dropped down before us. There were a bunch of people here, mostly college kids.
A man, half-military, half-salesman, stood before us all, announcing that if we climbed up the ladder (which had been the phoenix tail) to the helicopter (which had been the phoenix body), we could have a free test-trip to The Flying Casino. I was actually the first in line. My hands were already on the rungs of the ladder. The whole thing seemed so cheap. I didn't want to do it and demean my conception of the phoenix.
I looked at my left (or right?) hand, which was now not holding onto a rung and was instead down by my waist. I had a "wand" -- a yellow, plastic, hollow cylinder topped with an octagonal (don't know real term) faceted plastic, pale "amethyst" or "purple stone."
This was the pass into the casino. Each person was to go up one at a time. They each got two (or two and a half?) minutes to test the casino.
The "salesman" said, "Climb on up!"
I said, "What am I gonna see up there? Fun and prizes?"
I was trying to joke like this was a funny version of what the salesman had to put up with everyday. But the salesman just glared at me and said, "Huh. Yeah... Get up there."
I climbed up. I put my head up through a hole in the "floor" of the "helicopter." It was green and metallic. Inside, the place felt expansive, though I couldn't see a whole lot.
A guy in a white military officer's uniform and cap knelt at the hole. He welcomed me. I didn't get completely up into the space. If my field of vision were a room, the officer would have correlated with a corner just to my right. I looked to my left. Behind a loose net were a couple other guys at vague tables. Behind the officer's right shoulder was an opening to what looked like the deck of a ship. Behind the officer's left shoulder was another netted or screened enclosure with vague machines I took to be video games.
The officer asked me if I would like to have a cart ride around the ship. I said, mock-ashamedly, "Oh, no. Each person only has a couple minutes."
I felt that everybody up here felt the same dislike for me that the "salesman" felt down below. But now I'd made it worse by acting ashamed when I really wasn't, or, rather, acting more ashamed than I really was.
Dream 2
My friend R (?) stood before me reading a statement from a piece of paper. I listened and reacted pretty strongly to each thing he said. First I was disgusted. Then I was relieved. Then, as his statements go weirder and weirder, I got uneasy in a way like a horribly exaggerated version of a reaction to watching someone bowling begin and then slowly progress toward a gutterball.
R said something like, "I was brought to court" (or put in jail?) "for child molestation charges. But now I will hold my deal with the courts not to misbehave. It is my personal goal to find a young girl -- but not too young! -- but rather young. And then I will do certain things to her she does not like. She will be a little child. And I will do some gross things to her and get away with it."
No comments:
Post a Comment