(6/18/05) the curative blood of the sacred sarcophagus

(Entered in paper journal at 9:25 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was possibly part of some expedition, possibly in Egypt. There was something like a cat-sized mummy, but it was supposed to be a human or part of a human. It seems more like it was wrapped in basket-woven reed strips than cloth. Yet it's also like it was in stone, like a sarcophagus.

I was down deep in a tunnel like in a tomb's labyrinth. There was a candle lighting the view. Now the heart was inside the (body?). It was also mummified. But it dripped drops of blood, so much so that the strips of cloth were purple with blood now: a dry, caked purple soaked anew with new blood all the time.

I asked the lady anthropologist/archaeologist if the drops wouldn't soak the stone on which the "sarcophagus" lay. (This soaking would cause something bad to happen to the tomb structure.) As soon as I asked that question I realized how stupid it was, and I sat and bore the explanation the anthropologist was giving me, even though I already knew it now -- The "sarcophagus" was surrounded in thick stone, and no liquid could get through it.

I now saw, by candlelight, a wall painting in the Egyptian style of a man, bare-chested and wearing a skirt (?), carrying the "sarcophagus" down a stone slope to the tomb area where it now lay. The explanation of this scene was strange, something like a sacrifice of the dead. This being had died naturally (?), in other words, and its corpse was somehow sacrificed. The sacrifice had truly made the "sarcophagus" sacred, for its drops of heart blood now had the power of curing a specific disease.

I now saw the "sarcophagus" laying as if untouched (it had been standing before). At its head was an egg-shaped object -- the heart. It was alternately in stone and in blood-soaked cloth strips. The anthropologist had collected a sample of this blood in a cylindrical beaker about three inches in diameter and five inches in height.

I was the one who would test this blood for curative effects. But the anthropologist warned me that the blood (which looked like silty pond water) may have certain water-borne bacteria which could give me a nasty intestinal sickness. The "blood," now pond water (!), had to be analyzed in a lab before I tested it.

Now I was in the lab: a white, sterile place, with a male scientist in a white lab coat. The pond water was now like it had never been blood, like it had never come from "Egypt." The male scientist, as young and healthy as the female scientist had been, was now the person I had been working with all along. The scientist said the analysis process would take place in a couple days and that it would take about twenty-eight hours.

I was now sitting in an old, cheap car with a female scientist. We were on a roadside by a wood post fence surrounding either a large yard or a small park.

I told the scientist that if she needed me to help out with the twenty-eight-hour analysis, which I knew would be a big deal with the scientists, I would gladly volunteer for the whole time. But then I remembered that I wouldn't be volunteering outside. I'd be volunteering in a lab, just sitting there for twenty-eight hours straight.

I thought about reneging. But then I figured that I was, after all, interested in the unique properties of the pond water. (It, of course, no longer had the curative effect the blood had, but there was still something scientifically interesting about it.)