I'm my sister Althea... only drawn as a cartoon. We all are. We live in a universe that's just a vast, crudely drawn comic strip. We look a bit like Peanuts characters, but more cubist and abstract than Peanuts ever was--we're all just chunky assemblages of squares and circles.

My father expects me to take care of a distorted, extremely cubist little kid--you'd never guess he's Charlie Brown, Charles Schulz's alter ego... except for his T-shirt with that characteristic zigzag stripe.

Cubist Charlie is psychic. He keeps seeing disasters ahead of time. I, Althea, can sense disasters dimly myself, I always have--just enough second sight to know this clumsy little kid is right. He has the sharpest sense of the future I've ever seen, far better than mine. Unfortunately, my dad believes ESP is nonsense. He just calls poor Charlie irrational, clumsy, stupid... when the poor kid's just paralyzed with horror at what's to come.

Red ink spills, a sea of red, "the multitudinous seas incarnadine"... It dries, staining the whole world bloody. Only a few small islands are still white paper. My dad wants us to stay "rational" about the disaster: no problem, no danger, you're just clumsy...

And then the dry red paper becomes a railroad, and it grows and enhuges and immenses till a frightful Engine boils up from the paper, and the red LOCO MOTIVE runs over the whole world. And, of course, kills us all.

And I yell "Your reason is fake, you won't listen to anyone!"

And my dad says "Just calm down, and you'll see when you're rational that..."

And I want to kill him, but I can't, because we're already dead.

• Charlie Brown = one of the running gags in Peanuts, spun out with variations for decades, was Lucy's ability to talk Charlie into practicing football kicks. She invariably pulled the ball away so he fell, and Charlie knew it, but he was unable to resist her line of talk, and always tried the kick despite his misgivings. My dream splits poor Charlie into his components--the one who knows, and the one who discounts what he knows.
• Charlie's dad = my dad. He was quite psychic, as was obvious on the few occasions he told us dreams. But he was a strict rationalist, a Freudian who saw dreams as a garbage dump. A devout scientist--with three psychics for kids!
• Cubism = how I sure felt as a kid, crushed like a can under America's truck tire of practicality. And your body does turn awkward and ugly, when you constantly sense warnings you can't justify, can't act on. Your nerves eventually gridlock and you lose your natural grace. The fear and despair mounts like a wave...
• Sea of red ink = financial disaster? More like blood! Guilt? Reminds me of mad Lady Macbeth...
• The Loco Motive = both Freud and my dad (who got his degree just as the Freudian wave peaked in American colleges) believed that profoundly irrational motives lurked underneath our conscious restraints. My dad felt inner motives should STAY suppressed or sublimated, because they ARE loco, crazy...

I think this dream is when I realized my dad could deny anything and sacrifice anyone, even his family, to protect his scientific worldview. His faith.

It took a while longer to face that I had an internalized copy of him that passionately disparaged my intuition, even strong warnings I needed to hear and act on. This hyper-rationality was endangering my life!

And maybe you have a voice like that too. Drowning out your own ugly, awkward, terrified, clear-sighted, cubist Charlie Brown.

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