I'm confused. I think I just worldhopped again. But I don't think I did it. Was I pushed? No, I was drawn into... I forget.

I seem to be alone in a dry stony world--at least here at the transfer point. Hills and sea and sparse windy grasses between the gravel. Feel like I used a well between the worlds, but I'm not sure. So disoriented. I know I came out of this low square concrete building behind me, open to the sky (which is blue). Some clouds, moving fast in wind. This place feels generically familiar--could it be an airfield?

I walk round the building... want to carve this place very deep in memory right away, every landmark--it may be the only gate home.

I round the corner and a unicorn stands before me. No visible horn--but I never even think of horses. The power and intelligence shed off him like heat from an iron. Great assurance, a little ruthless even. He's a leader--no question. THE leader. The Chief Unicorn. I know now he has summoned me here, to his world. He still pulls me to him.

I want to touch him. I... stroke his mane. Feels good--get a charge of something like static but not. Dare to touch his neck. Scared. But want to.

He bows his head a little, and closes his great eyes. I feel a bit bolder, scratch between his ears, almost can pretend I'm petting an animal, now that his eyes aren't showing his mind. My fingers tingle, not as if asleep--normal life is asleep, this is alive. Each contour talks to my skin, tickling, waking me more. I find a strange rectangular sunken callus on top of his head, a few inches wide. In front of it, where I kept expecting the traditional horn, is a small mirror, like a surgeon's reflector; and in the middle of the depression is a sort of candleholder or flower-stand, with a single dried and blowing rose in it, narrow as if it was picked early, almost as a bud. The arrangement is like ikebana; my eyes are as filled with this mystery as my hands are by his mane. Not hypnosis; coming out of trance.

I ask "Did you know about this?" and describe this little altary setup on his head. He opens his eyes, amusement pours out of him like sunshine, I can feel it--but he won't say yes or no. I'm unsure if he's bluffing and didn't know, or if he thinks it's funny that I don't know all about this stuff. I pull the dead rose out impulsively and show him. As I do, I notice an almond up there too... Rose and almond, reflected in the mirror.

He says "Put your hand on my belly."

I do. Fur there is so soft. Like a cat's.

He says "Lower."

I slide my hand down, suddenly feeling nervous. Does lower mean toward the ground or...

He says "Further back."

I slide my hand meekly, dangerously near his cock. My face is hot with embarrassment. My pulse starts pounding! I'm a nurse, why am I such a prude?

Is this JUST embarrassment? My skin is tingling.

"Further." he says firmly. I feel shaky. My crotch feels warm. Slippery? Oh no, I can't believe this! I'm blushing so hard my ears are sore. What am I going to do, stick my other hand in there to check? One hand on him and one on me. Besides, I know. I slide further back. The back of my hand touches his huge cock. My hand is trapped between his belly and penis. Like radar I feel the nerves in my hand trying to sense if he's excited... When will he say something? Or... will I have to do something? I can't. I can't. I don't even know what's possible. He has to tell me.

He says, "There. Feel that throbbing?" God, yes! "That's my five hearts."

WHAT?

He's a unicorn. I'm in another world. He can have five hearts in his belly. Next to his cock which I'm touching and he won't say a word.

"Do they sound okay to you? I know you're a health professional in your world, so I summoned you. Are my five hearts okay?"

Numbly I do as he says--shift my attention from the back of my hand to the palm. Quell my own drumming. Yes--a five-part rhythm, all even and slow and strong.

"Sure." I say. "They're all fine." Although mine's in two.

Not that anyone cares. He's such a sexy creature... but I guess he's not interested in ME. Just my skills. The same old story. Or maybe not, and he's just indirect...

Indirect? He as much as told me to put my hand on his penis, and I did it! Pretty loud body talk... and now we both act deaf. I just stand here, hiding my disappointment and excitement!

I am disappointed in him. Yet I've shown him none of my feelings, shown less initiative than he has...

Now what?

FOUR YEARS LATER (1993/7/8)

I'm in Java Beach, a cafe by the sea in San Francisco. I pull a book from their donated, public shelf. "UNICORNS!" Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I open it at random. An article by Avram Davidson, "Spoor of the Unicorn". He quotes Hildegarde of Bingen (who in her own era was as famous for healing as for composing) on the healing-lore of unicorns: "The touch of any part of a unicorn can heal, not just the horn." So making love with a unicorn will heal you as well as murdering it for the horn! How I wish...

And--I'm incredulous--Hildegarde says "if you remove the horn, underneath is a metal surface, smooth and transparent as glass, in which you may see your own face as in a mirror." Images straight out of my dream! Hildegarde the nurse/healer, a unicorn with no horn--even a mirror-brow.

So the nurse I was in that dream may have been Hildegarde von Bingen! In a past life, was I Hildegarde, or a nurse who learned her lore? Certainly not in THIS lifetime: I never read this essay, or any of Hildegarde's writings. Either I reached back centuries to another life, or four years ahead, to shape my dream around a startling quote I would read in a cafe. Either way, my dream did just what its images show me doing--leapt into another world, past or future, and felt the very heartbeat of the impossible.
And then whine because I don't have the nerve to ask it to fuck me too. Or marry me, and live... where, exactly?

NEARLY THREE YEARS LATER (1996/5/2)

I dream I'm in Washington DC, at a trolley stop outside the State Dept. Talking to a middle-aged woman who's a diplomat. She says her branch specializes in problems involving patents and genetic engineering. Recent case involved what seemed to be the abuse of a horse. Through genetic manipulation or surgery someone had grafted a live rose onto its forehead! Like a botanical unicorn... I gasp--recognition--I KNOW this being from a dream-journey long ago! FIVE HEART UNICORN. He's no experiment! That's HIM--the living rose for a horn, an oval hand-mirror inset in his brow, and five beating hearts. I'm afraid of what she's going to tell me they did to him... Yes. "We went in surgically and tried to remove the rose, but each cut healed almost as we made it. Incredible tissue vitality. We realized at last the rose'd just regrow. So we closed up with it still in. The horse doesn't seem to mind it. By next morning the scars were almost gone." I'm relieved! And a little angry--they're professionals, they should know better... mistaking a unicorn for an abused horse! Really! And I wake...

SO what was that about? And then I remember. Today I found an old love poem I wrote to Silky. Not a girl in this world--I meet her in dreams. And she's not human. A shapeshifter, she often shows up as a talking mare--or unicorn. The poem is swollen with love and lust--toward her in horse form. A love poem to my shamanic familiar? You could equally call it a bestiality-filled series of psychotic hallucinations. I felt scared, setting it down--passing the point of no return. Into madness, I guessed, but... I felt sexy and right.

Today I tinkered with that love poem--some confusing meters, some weak phrases. It seems I was lucky: the patient had such vitality no harm was done. But it's a warning--don't try to regularize my profound strangeness. Like those early editors who made Emily Dickinson rhyme!

And I'm my own butcher.

Or is it just curiosity? Gotta look under the hood? Even Hildegard the great healer tore off someone's horn to find that mirror.

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