I'm tired and don't know why. My friend Alder mentions some art & music events happening today, but I just can't get out of the house. Stay in and do bills, repot some plants, install some hooks. Walk over the hill to the Farmer's Market but it's too late, they've all packed and gone home. So I scrape the numbers scrawled over my windshield by the city towing company when they found my stolen car. Only now does my car feel fully mine again. But I don't use it--don't cross town to Fort Mason or the SF Folk Festival. A zombie today.

Wonder if it's my dad in the hospital. Tell him in my head "I have no more energy to give, you're on your own now--live or die." Brutal but true. I feel squeezed dry. There's normal grief... and there's exhaustion. I visualize cutting the psychic links between us.

Still drained.

Just play with Photoshop. Feel better immediately. Art is the cure! Scan some close-ups of my dream-painting American Tanka and fade out the edges, leaving only the central figures in each scene. Floating vignettes! I like the effect--new for me, as I tend toward dense & feverish. Ah, space!

Next I draw some spot illustrations for a second dream, His Deer Wife: Captain Nezahualcoyotl, and a picture of his part-vicuņa wife (the Aztec-Incan Empire is big on genetic engineering), and a little sketch of the cover of an Andre Norton science fiction pulp, of a crashed time machine. Like a downed flying saucer.

Can't paint any more. Eat dinner, watch TV...

Find a BBC mystery written by PD James: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Cordelia Gray (played by Helen Baxendale) the Woman with the Unsuitable Job (detective) gets betrayed. Another employee of the man who hired her throws a sack over her head, tosses her down a well, and lugs an iron lid onto its mouth. She'll never be found.

Except...

Stunned, half drowned, down a well, trapped in darkness, she climbs the wall by feel, pries off that iron lid, and crawls out--a dripping, bruised Fury.

Fleeing her in an almost supernatural panic--what is she, undead?--her murderer man trips and gets himself killed!

Grim but... archetypal.

Then Cleopatra 2525--by the producers of Xena, and even pulpier than Xena at its Xena-est.

Cleo (Jennifer Sky), a rather timid girl from our era, gets frozen in a time capsule and wakes five centuries later.

The future's not pretty. Earth's occupied. Humanity lives in tunnels, fights to take back the surface.

Cleo gets drafted by the insurgents. In boot camp, she fails mock missions over and over. Just not a fighter. But they're desperate, and at last poor Cleo gets sent out half-trained, into the underworld.

It's a weird gamespacy labyrinth full of monsters and mutants. Cleo walks through one door and finds herself on stage in a lounge, and has to sing; the next door opens to a corridor of slime, yuck! Bad as Cordelia in her well. And the next door, and the next...

Cleo avoids fighting, knows she hasn't learned to be a hero. She finally succeeds by tossing the part she always botches to her friend, who gets it right with no training at all! The wise message of teamwork, flexibility and humility shines, dreamlike, right through the inept, cartoony script.

I like Cleo--unheroic, even timid, but trying so hard, so bravely. What could be sexier?

Secret agents attack a dark-haired 12-year-old girl in a mall, stuffing her in a coarse sack. They have an adult woman in another bag. They zap both prisoners with a device that swaps their minds: the child's now in the woman's body, the woman's, in the child's. They thrash blindly in the sacks but can't fight back effectively, disoriented in these unfamiliar bodies.

The agents lug the twitching sacks to an escalator or conveyor belt that swallows and mashes whatever doesn't get off... and toss the sacks on. The girl's body is crushed to death.

But the agents, alert and brutal before swapping their souls, are over-confident that a soul in a new body will be helpless; they walk off to buy coffee after tossing their victims on the death-belt!

And the girl's spirit, though in a strange adult body, takes advantage of some small distraction to roll off. Slowly she squirms out of the sack. Slinks up the stairs like a stalking cat, and takes cover in the crowd gawking idly at her own bloody, pulped corpse. They seem to treat murder as normal for a shopping mall--just idle entertainment.

She can't go back to her old life. Her family won't accept some adult stranger! And she has no adult skills or identity.

She becomes homeless, lives on the street. Her face gets tanned and coarsely lined. Not just grown up in a flash... middle-aged! Cruel.

But she's determined to fight those who stole her childhood. She becomes an agent on our side, one of the best--keeps the unusual coordination and adaptability that saved her from being crushed. She learns to dance, sing, skate, do judo and gymnastics in this unfamiliar, hard-used body.

Her spirit's energy is so strong she can temporarily appear as the much younger woman she would've been--a beautiful twenty-year actress in a short red skirt. In that form, she auditions and wins her own TV show, and uses her abilities to fight the kidnappers--no distinction between TV villains and real ones.

The enemy agents pulled one final dirty trick on her, in case she escaped: the adult body they put her in is incurably insane. Has visions, hallucinations. But they forget she had twelve years of grounding in reality! Enough so she treats these visions as metaphors and uses them in her acting--draws the audience in and shows them.

In one scene on her show, we see through her eyes as all the people murdered by these kidnappers climb out of their graves in sewers, trash cans, under heavy machinery... their spirits ready to fight injustice. These spooks give her warnings and advice that save her life.

But then she turns and says with practical adult irony in her voice "And now we return you to reality." If she has to hallucinate, she's going to keep the realms of matter and spook (outer and inner) clearly separate. But not by ignoring her ghosts: their warnings are accurate--useful! She's psychic and crazy. Neither defines her.

Because she listens to her madness but stays in control, she's one of the most effective agents for good we have.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Girl in a bag, murder attempt, escape, revenge: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman--her own client's minion throws a sack over her head and chucks her down a well.
• Sing, dance in a red dress on TV: Cleopatra 2525. Lost in the mutant underground, Cleo conquers her shyness, learns to sing, dance, do ninja stunts. In a red dress.
• Body-switched: my childhood and teens were stolen by bullying and years of chronic illness. Now I feel cast away in time--stranded in this fragile adult body.
• Message 1: It's my dad's life, and my dad's death. He lives or dies on his own. Let go. My body has limits and I've reached them.
• Message 2: Even my body's weaknesses--like porous boundaries against psychic intrusions--can be strengths, if I listen to the signals I get.
• Action? Remember: you're only crazy if you act oblivious. As long as you reassure others, announce what you're doing, people will accept almost any behavior. Of course, I live in San Francisco. Still, try it. Framing is all.

The World Dream Bank homepage - Art Gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Bibliography
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites