Dream 1
Can't remember how it began. Left from a church area. Drove back to it or came back to it. But now it was different somehow. And now it was at first all by itself with a small parking lot like at the edge of a small town
and then it was like one of the last filled spaces in a defunct strip mall in a suburb with a huge parking lot.
As I came up to this place I could hear someone denouncing it, saying something like (which then actually became), "In our church if people were to die like that we'd bury them. In your church you'd eat them." (This was to say, "You'd make them die like that and then you'd eat them.") I now saw a photocopied article from some journal like Newsweek entitled something like, "You Eat Them When They Die."
It had been a bright, blue day. Now it was night. My NYC Americorps crew chief SM walked away from the church and into the parking lot, saying something like, "You guys are sick. You act like it's Christianity. But it's just killing people."
There was a very calm voice from somewhere saying, "Well if you really believe that, come check. We're open and in service right now."
I looked into all the windows from my distance, maybe fifty feet away. I could see only dim glimmers of light like fluorescent light behind tinted windows and good blinds or even some kind of poster board or drywall. I stayed that far away, yet I was also right by the entrance door, which I also saw from my distance as boarded off.
I kept feeling a strange protrusion like the lip of a cubicle's trashcan pushing outward from the board of the door. I wondered how people got in and out and where the voice came from. It seemed to me this place was either closed down forever or top secret.
But now I was only right by the door, not fifty feet away. I now felt the protrusion to be something like a portable chest of papers, a cardboard-like box papered over with some nice, floral-like designs. I didn't see or feel the front fully. I just opened the top drawer and looked at the first photocopied article I found, which was a series of self-help "healthy living" style articles trying to promote the idea that this church was more about keeping healthy than anything else. I put it away.
I was now in a dark room. Beside me was a door. There was a fluorescent light next door,. The church service was taking place. This room, empty, dark, thin-carpeted, with one dresser and this strange square of file drawers, was the visitor's room. I could barely see anything, yet I saw everything clearly enough.
I pulled out an article I don't remember. It was strange enough and close enough to cannibalism to scare me.
I flipped the box around to see the titles on each file drawer. I don't think I was supposed to do this. I did it surreptitiously.
Next door the service was all a show, put on to make me feel like what I'd heard about this church being cannibalistic was false. There was always a low undercurrent of voices under a lead voice which smoothly yet angrily spoke against people like me who apparently didn't understand religion and yet were "loved" by the religious, anyway.
I pulled out another article from another drawer whose title frightened me but which I forgot as soon as I read it. The article was in defense of cannibalism as a way of staying healthy. It was written in some self-help style of the previous article, but now with an implication even that people who do not believe will be cruelly murdered as well as eaten.
I realized this was a second- or third-level-initiated reading and that I had looked into a drawer I wasn't supposed to look into. But I couldn't remember the drawer I had opened. I put the article in the "Real-Time Live AV Files" drawer, since that was the only title I remembered. But when I closed the drawer I remembered that the article had actually been from a drawer one or two drawers up.
But when I reopened the drawer the article was no longer there. There were tapes which I could tell had a fat, bald, southern-drawled man yelling that the outsiders no longer had a right to persecute the church. And there was a glossy nine-by-thirteen-inch-thick, glossy-covered book, its cover's top half black with yellow lettering and its bottom half a color photo. The title of the book was something like A Technical Manual for a Happy and Blessed Human Communion.
Once again, despite the happy photo of a WASPish family in the woods as if just walking back home from Sunday service, I felt some menacing conviction (and the voices and voice in the next room continued) that the text would constantly imply that those who read this book would be cruelly murdered as well as cannibalized.
I looked at the spine of the book, to the publisher's name, on the bottom of the spine -- The Highest Heaven Society. I was revolted.
(Entered in paper journal at 6:20 AM on 2/14/05 at home in Harlem.)
Dream 2
I walked along an asphalt path with trees on my right at the top of a thickly treed, short slope down to a creek and on my left a street like in East Denver, probably a side street with a factory or warehouse on the other side. I was probably heading toward work or something like work. I had left my glasses where I had just come from (possibly work -- where I was heading, too).
Now a red-tailed hawk flew toward me. I knew it was a red-tailed hawk but I couldn't see it for certain. I spoke to it, telling it hello and that I was glad it had come to see me again. It landed on a tree branch, then flew across to another that was closer to me.
I wished it could get closer. It sensed that, too, as if it also were getting something out of my clear vision of it. It flew down and almost landed on the ground before deciding that wasn't even a possibility.
Both I and it looked for some branch that was low enough for it to land on and for me still to get close enough to see it clearly without my glasses. But in one second, or maybe a half a second, we discovered nothing, and I lifted out my left hand for the hawk to land on.
The hawk landed on my hand. It wasn't heavy. But as it landed, my vision shifted. I was "lying down" in a bed in the dark. But the bed was upright and in a thick of treetops at the ridge of the creek bank's slope. The hawk had crawled onto my head. I felt its fleshy stomach (?) moving around. I kept waiting for it to shit or piss on my head.
After this there may have been some scene where I was in or around some house with a group of folks, watching some movie.
But now it was daytime again. I stood on a path overlooking a steep slope, a box canyon, down maybe fifty feet to a dry bed on the left wall of which was a grey stone arch tunnel. There was a bridge across the gap and another asphalt path on the other side. Then there was a short strip of grass and a wide road that connected down a way to the side road, beside which was the asphalt path on which I had been before.
I felt I must get back there to take care of what hadn't been taken care of. But a slightly older man, a boss like one of the ecology people in the parks would be a "boss" for my Americorps crew (even though our crew chief would be our actual supervisor), kind of held me here in obligation. I wasn't incredibly worried.
Suddenly a bird flew down the canyon. It had a round, disc-like body, probably of broawn feathers, a long tail, and a long neck with a blue head.
It looked maybe three feet long, pretty big. It soared directly in front of me and the boss.
I saw the bird's head and asked the boss if the bird was a pheasant. He said no. He gave me some garbled science talk.
I continued to watch the bird, which grew huge. Its colors changed to white with red, granite-dot-like stipples on the back and red and white stripes for the tail, and a white neck with a green head. It was maybe ten feet long, with a twenty-food wingspan (whereas before its wingspan was maybe only slightly larger than its body). The bird slowly hovered backwards into the arch tunnel.
The boss was gabbing away this whole time. And finally he said, "They call that bird the Backin."
I was in a car with a bunch of friends, kids, probably. We were looking at Polaroids and/or doing something we weren't supposed to be doing.
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