1: HELL CHESS

On this Elysian field, let's play Hell Chess. Pieces are life-size, with numbered vests, like marathon runners--these red breast digits mark rank. Strength? Who's best? Number Zero: Claim-On-Faith. Yea, that never had much heft for me. Number One: the Pawn of Proof. Too bad all I now trust as truth is what I've lived. Too many public lies. Number Two: the Thin Twin Goddesses. Not slimmity corporeal but doubt. And "twins"? Sextuplets, all one size, shape--and meekness. Weak as pawns in Chess Mundane. "Thin": sexist? I fear their 'wee sleekit' name implies women are tim'rous beasties; their leaders will be male. But nay: Three and Four share a sobriquet: The Full Goddess Twins. Yet they move unlike--knight-odd, rook-square. What they share is confidence and power; Twins who fully own their strength arcane. Hell-Chess Five and Six are stronger still, if abstract. Five I lost at dawn, but Six will outclass even Alice's fierce Red Queen. Empress of the Hellysian team, opalescent essence. Her name: Clouds Tinged With Colors. But I never do play Hell Chess--the game board becomes bed; begets a counter-dream.

2: COMING CAUSES AMNESIA

I'm in a flinty tale. It takes for granite we all reincarnate. Reinstratanate. Even continents recycle, float; awareness is a still more buoyant plate. Why then ever dread the Forger who Vulcan-hammers you anew? Then the dream careens into sex-farce! Teenage lovers who tell in turns our geomyth, get lured off-tale from eons dinosaured, tsunami-swept by lust--and then, subducted, blocked and barred as they lick clit and cock. Gets hard to talk! She gets a grand idea, tries to tell him around that jaw full. He can feel she's inspired--but on eruption's verge, lava-hot, he can't heed her yet. When she says "Courage", that 'j' sound thrums shiversweet until volcano comes. Fire-plume ebbs, and he reaffirms "I swear I'll listen--once my brain returns." A crude dream-joke. But it conceals a moral. Well, amoral. Thing. I know (in dream) it means rebirth: our selves convect, like every rock on Earth. Why do our past lives melt? Well, coming (coming here, incarnate birth!), that mesh with flesh can overwhelm a billion years of memory, our mantled hoard of souvenirs. Diamonds from the deep. Our everything.

NOTES: HELL-CHESS

• Hell Chess: I reread a 1970 underground comic, Air Pirates Funnies from Hell Comix. Motto: "If you're looking for laughs, go to Hell!" They hoped to outrage the powerful, and did; they got dragged into court for obscenity and copyright violation, for showed Mickey and Minnie Mouse doing 69. One of the Air Pirates, Dan O'Neill, was actually sentenced never to draw mice. Proving his point that Disney and the government were... rodents. So who had the last laugh?
• Sleekit, tim'rous: echoes Robert Burns's 1785 poem To a Mouse: "wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie..." Yep, that's me.
• Clouds Tinged With Colors:
  1. Challenges the black & white thinking of chess, with only friend/foe (or men/women?). Hints at a mystic spectrum beyond now, beyond body, beyond war.
  2. Last week I dreamt Earth had colored rings, and their shadows created microclimates where plants adapted to subtly tinted sun.

NOTES: COMING CAUSES AMNESIA

• Oral sex and speech: today my housemate Jamie & I confessed our sexual histories--both appalling, full of abuse. My dream found that confession as intimate as sex itself. I've noticed this before--when in waking life I break through to new honesty, my dreams that night are often orgasmic. Note the echoes of Air Pirates Funnies, too--Mickey & Minnie doing sixty-nine.
• Geology: remember the old euphemism for an orgasm, "Did the earth move"?
• Pun on "coming"--orgasm versus birth: this isn't Freudian symbolizing (trains or cigars mean sex) but the reverse--a dream using sex as an easily-grasped image for more abstract ideas: incarnation in the dream, and intimacy awake. This isn't a new idea; Ann Faraday first proposed reverse-Freudian dreams in the early 1970s.

Dream 1 shows reactions to abuse, from meek silence to speaking out. But it ends hinting at that beyond battle are "clouds tinged with colors". Dream 2 says I get overwhelmed by immediate body sensations, but under them lie deep memories of other bodies, other lives back through ages. Trailing clouds of Wordsworthian glory... You may not buy the metaphysics--dunno if I do, awake--but if I treat these dreams not as lone curios, but as a one-two punch, I'm pretty sure that's what they mean. Jung urged dreamworkers to see such cross-dream patterns. Capitalism teaches us to think short-term--the drug rush, the punchline, the orgasm. But dreams play long.

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