THAT DAY

I'm transcribing old journals from 1973. A rough year. I got a lottery number meaning I could be drafted; as a vegetarian pacifist I applied for Conscientious Objector status. My sister Althea ran away. I left home too, off to college. Constant pelvic pain (severe gluten intolerance that doctors told me I didn't have). Dating disasters--I met girls I really liked, but was trained to feel such sexual guilt I backed away.

It's hard to read. Emotionally, yeah, but I mean physically too--little pocket notebooks, faded pencil scrawls, telegraphic, cryptic and so faint they're barely legible (I darkened the photo at left--a lot--the raw scan looked nearly blank.)

But hidden in the faint scrawls I find & transcribe dozens of forgotten dreams, not even mentioned in the index--from snippets to hundreds of words. Very revealing dreams. (The right-hand page in the picture hid the dream-source of Squirrel Girl).

I spend all day lost in the past. A rich, painful past. A torrent of opportunities for love, all wasted and betrayed. I was too sick to crawl to the edge and sip--and brutally trained not to, not even when it begged my lips.
THAT NIGHT

I record eight dreams, nearly 1000 words. Here are the climactic four:

5: CHILDHOOD'S ABYSS

I'm trying to climb a crumbly dirt bank or cliff maybe five meters high (16'). Near the top is a cave--really a groove or gallery running along the face many yards, but just half a meter high. Must be at least two deep, since a row of teenage girls, mostly Asian, are packed in it side by side on pads or mattresses; feet in, heads out, peering down at me. They're in bras and panties. The world's biggest sleepover!

Two younger girls, tweens not teens, maybe as little as ten, are still climbing up, though ahead of me. I start to slip and grab one girl's ankle. Mostly just to stabilize, not to drag her down. She doesn't mind--after the next step up, she reaches her foot back to literally give me a leg up.

Once the two kids are in reach of the gallery girls, they stretch down to help the kids up. But that means I'm alone for the last bit of the climb out of childhood's abyss. It has no handholds at all, so I scoop one out of the adobe bank. Try to lift myself up into the gallery, but can't quite--I feel shaky, though that's more fear about leverage than weakness--if I use my full strength, these holds may just crumble. Have to hold back, go slow, be gentle.

Also... I worry it's so packed on the Ledge of Teens they can't scoot over, or won't. That there's no space for me. That there's no one for me?

Must I climb on up the cliff to the top? Above the gallery of faces, barely a meter of dirt, so I'm pretty sure I could--if I can reach the ledge at all.

NOTES

• Long climb toward girls above me: how I felt in high school & college. Felt girls were above me--just being male was defective, tainted (thanks, Mom!) That made me back away from girls I liked and who liked me. I couldn't even face how deep & abusive my training had been; I just kept hoping if I got away from my parents I'd soon heal on my own. The dream rubs my nose in what the journal showed: not easily, not soon, and not on my own.
• Cramped ledge-gallery up a cliff:
  1. The stifling, conformist cliques of high school and college. Sexy, but the social swim's dark side.
  2. That Borneo tribe with such a ledge-gallery-cave up a cliff where they cram their dead ancestors.
  3. The cramped pages of my ancient journals. The past as death cult!
• Asian teens together: At the Farmers' Market today, two walked by. Chatting, they ignored me. Sexy. I felt guilty for gawking.
• Grab younger girl's ankle, she helps me up past shaky holds: the dream's suggesting attraction to anyone underage is (at least in MY case) caused by feeling weak, shy, tentative & guilty about sex, thanks to an abusive mom. Not about power over kids or teens, as it is for many abusers; I just share a lot of teen sexual struggles and feeings. I'm so far behind that even adolescence is a stretch, and adult games seem quite above me. So far.
• Scoop a handhold that helps a bit: transcribe the journals, face the past?
• Only at the end did I see that I could leave! Limited ambition--still trying to climb from my childhood abyss, up to adolescence, when just one more meter up the cliff, ABOVE the cramped cave-gallery, was open ground: adulthood.

6: CLOSET WERECAT

I'm friends with a willowy Latina who has to go to a party full of rich & powerful types, where she's ill at ease. I come along for moral support. Suddenly my view shifts, and I see why she's so nervous. The scene becomes penciled grayscale, and the angle tilts so I see her soles and up her gown, feet and shins... and what I see isn't human. She has big short wide feet, with claws--digitigrade animal paws like a wolf or puma. She's half-crouching on them so her heel/fetlocks function as heels and help stabilize her--let her walk upright so can can pass as human.

But only pass. She's really a werecat, and her feline form won't go away entirely. One foot has a CAT hidden inside it! I mean her foot's like a transparent bottle poured full of her latent cat form. I see it as a masterful shaded pencil drawing--a housecat squished into a foot-shaped bottle!

The cat has an oddly brushy, uncatlike tail... Oh. IT'S full of an animal spirit too--fierce and toothy, with a wedge-shaped face; a wolf? Hard to be sure, it's so squished in--but not a cat. As a cat, she's a were-something-else! Latent form inside latent form. And what's that critter inside ITS tail?

The creatures look trapped, crushed. No wonder she's uneasy. It's not power or wealth but humanity itself that scares her. Schmoozing with the killer apes...

But I now see why I felt attracted: her animal side. Though she hides it well from the humans. Only art bares her true... sole(s).

NOTES

• Shapeshifting girl: in Patricia McKillip's Kingfisher, Merle's daughter learns he shapeshifts. Will she inherit the trait?
• Shy? No, much deeper: my college journals. Knew I'd been sexually crippled, and knew I was gifted, but assumed I was among peers; I wasn't. Didn't know I was a prodigy, or a fur, or autistic.
• Only slow, detailed art reveals the complex inner truth: transcribing journals--not just an index or a summary but the full dreams, the full pain... the full strangeness. This isn't just abuse or neurosis or sexual dysphoria. Shamanic illness! Species dysphoria.

Two men who look like brothers guard and control a magical pattern that manifests as dotted spirals on a rounded tunnel wall. Inset glass or gemstones?

I'm unsure what it's used for, but I feel its power. Could I tap it?

Two more men visit; a couple. They lean right up on the magical wall and start making out, groping. Grosses out the brothers, who are very straight.

That shakes up the magic-pattern!

Their tunnel make-out session looked impulsive, but I wonder. Calculated?

Was this their purpose? Using sex to shift how magic works?

NOTES

• Cave walls inlaid or inset with dotted spirals:
  1. In Kingfisher, the goddess Calluna's grotto. The Grail is probably hers, not the god's.
  2. My dream journals themselves! Each dream's a dot; longterm patterns form developmental gyres or spirals, revisiting old issues but on a higher/bigger/further-out level (a model shared by Jung & Yeats).
  3. In Andre Norton's Storm on Warlock and Ordeal in Otherwhere, the Wyvern matriarchy uses inset wall-patterns as a registry showing the personal patterns of all their dream-shamans, AND as a magical reservoir the collective can tap. They mean both shamanic magic (which I've built up through dreams, transforming my life) AND the reverse sexism I suffered (the Wyverns thought males couldn't do dream magic; despite my successes, do I believe it too?)
  4. Australian dot paintings of the Dreamtime! They may well have inspired Norton; her Wyverns' gender segregation looks Australian to me. She certainly studied Celtic, Native American and Siberian shamanism, so for these books on a dream-based culture, why not the Dreamtime?
• Two (straight) brothers as custodians: Jung or Joseph Campbell would guess the pancultural Warrior Twins. And they could be right. But good custodians? Or too rigid, like the matriarchs of the Wyverns (and Norton's more famous Witch World books, too)?
• Gay couple messes with them: breaking taboos is a lever to change things--like my grabbing an underage girl to climb out of abyss in the first dream, and the voyeurism and furry sexuality in the next dream.

I'm upstairs, in my sister Miriel's little downtown apartment. A hot day. Blinds down to keep it shady. Miriel's in a gray tanktop and a salmon-pink G-string bikini bottom and nothing else. And soon peels off the top too. And then the bottom. Nude.

She's about sixteen again. So hot I can't keep my eyes off her.

And she knows it. She's annoyed--but not at my incestuous attraction, she WANTS my attention! Complains, in fact, that I don't touch her. "You want me that much, but you just stare, never touch." But... over the years I have, repeatedly, and then she always rejects me. Teasing!

Yet I also recall that we've lived together as lovers here for years! A long, open, incestuous affair.

When put side by side, I realize my distress isn't from clashing feelings but clashing facts, memories, timelines! They can't both be true.

Miriel strides naked into the kitchen and switches topics. "What's more, you left crumbs all over the cuttingboard & countertop. Clean up your mess!"

But I didn't. It's not my mess; it can't be. I don't eat bread; I'm allergic. And Miriel knows it.

I'm thinking "This is unhealthy. I need to leave. Not the incest, that's just a taboo. But false accusations? Now THOSE are toxic!"

I wonder--without the food falsehood, would I have seen the sexual falsehood?

I'm faintly aware it's a dream, and even suspect its source, back in my teens. One summer Miriel got a teeny weeny orange bikini. I couldn't keep my eyes off her, but that intense pull made me face that my incest feelings were hurting both of us, that no matter how much I longed for her, we HAD to... divorce.

NOTES

• Girl in small apartment: in Kingfisher, Vivien, who may be running the whole Grail spell. She's fae, and proves her boyfriend Damien's at least half-fae.
• Upstairs kitchen, girlfriend complains: once I cooked a Thai dinner for my girlfriend Cheryl, but as I cooked she complained about my shortcomings... nonstop. For an hour! I suddenly saw us with genders flipped and thought "I'm an abused housewife!" I walked out of the house, the date, and soon, out of her life.
• Incest feelings toward my sister: these old journals frequently mention this incestuous guilt. Dream hints my running from other girls I truly wanted may partly have been... monogamy. I assumed for years it was only (only!) gender-guilt my mom taught me, but did I also feel I'd be cheating? Not on Miriel, on THEM--could I truly say "I love you" when half MY loyalty was still bound to my sister?
• Wrong about crumbs: My sister's voice inside makes me feel "crumby" about stuff I didn't in fact do, that I did have the strength not to act on! Feelings aren't actions. The pattern's recurred: Cheryl accused me of imaginary stuff too.
• Miriel: literal? But I haven't seen her lately. The other dreams hint at a much broader meaning--unjustified guilt for any sexual deviance from my mom's... matriarchy.
• ACTION: avoid Miriel for now; bad for me. And don't push myself to date now--this guilt will still push me away from anyone attractive.

I'm better. Some. But I minimized the depth of my illnesses; I called myself "mildly" autistic, when it's quite severe. I wrote "ill/vulnerable"; today I know, after decades of misdiagnosis, I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome--a rare mutation causing fragile joints & tearable membranes, lowgrade lifelong scurvy, severe food sensitivities, easily overwhelmed senses and immune systems. If I hadn't won conscientious objector status in 1973, I'd probably have died just from Army food (or prison food; I'd have refused to fight). So it's a wary, fragile safety I've achieved.

I'm still single, and still not even looking--I fear to rouse a sleeping sexual monster. No, not inner guilt, outer persecution--from you neurotypicals. No matter what sexual taboos I break (note how the dreams carefully pick four diverse taboos so as to offend both left and right: kids, gays, furries, incest), you villagers of the Phone Age are ready and eager to light your rectangular little torches.

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