THAT DAY

My friend Catshall the poet calls. "I'm sick. You better not visit tomorrow." I'm a bit relieved--I'm still recovering too.

Draw a lot of illustrations for the World Dream Bank, then build a new subject list for dreams of big waterbirds--cranes, herons, egrets, swans...

Read Donna Leon's Dressed For Death. Cops in Venice nearly ignore the death of a transvestite hooker--till he turns out to be a banker and whistleblower who was killed, shaved, dressed up & dumped, to make the cops treat that murder as low priority. The schemer who silenced him nearly escapes. But at last legwork pays off; a cobbler identifies him and the red shoes they dressed their victim in.

Start Lisa Mantchev's So Silver Bright. Bertie is a strange girl who live in a theater. How strange? Once, under stress, she turned into a bird--thanks (she guesses) to her absent dad, a were-gull who just couldn't take living in the human world. Can Bertie?

I've never managed it.

Just before bed, I watch a French detective show with cute women and uncute men. Mobsters. Soapy, but it keeps me distracted so I don't overwork while convalescent.

Dream 1: THE MASKED BALLERINAS

I'm in a huge, glassy theater complex. Sliding glass doors into a lobby with ramps up to an inner level of dance studios above a big central theater. The nearest ramp's covered in ballet students practicing a modern dance--on the ramp. Teens and tweens, all girls, all in white or pastel leotards not classical black. Sexy bodies, sensitive intelligent auras, but something's odd; you wouldn't notice it in any individual, but en masse it's clear: all their heads and faces are large and their eyes are all wide-set and nearly as big as one of Disney's Fiona dolls. Which makes sense: they're all masks! Well not exactly masks--just a thin layer of movie latex makeup, false eyelashes and giant contact lenses. It's enough to hide their real faces and expressions behind big-eyed solemnity.

Why do it? Is it esthetic, part of this dance, or are they hiding their faces to ensure anonymity? But... dancers want credit. Dancers want fame!

Even masked, their auras shine like jewels in a dragon's hoard. Jewel-bright, disciplined, sensitive girls. Sexy! It seems ballet--maybe all the highbrow arts--attract my type.

And yet... I hover at the entrance, looking in, but I just don't try to slip up that ramp. I feel wary. For behind the masked dance is a big, wealthy cult, something like Werner Ehrhart's EST, with an agenda I'm not ready to face yet. Though I also know I'll have to come to terms with it eventually, since in most timebranches I'll meet my next girlfriend there, while writing the music for and/or helping choreograph a ballet.

Though I want to defer contact till I'm ready, a friend with questions about the program does drag me along for moral support into a small classroom with him, partway up one ramp. Asks a professorial guy, mid-level in their organization.

But the Professor just counterquestions my friend! I first I worry it's cultish evasion, but no; it's Socratic teaching! The questions prod my friend into realizing he already knows the answers.

Wait--do I already know the answer to the question of the masks?

• Slender ballerinas in white: Swans, cranes, herons & egrets I build a list for, today.
• Masks don't hide real (& admirable) character:
  1. Dressed for Death investigates what seems like the murder of a transvestite hooker. Not! A brave, whistleblowing banker exposing fraud--they killed, shaved, dressed up & dumped him figuring the cops'd treat that murder as low priority. And it nearly worked.
  2. On French cop show, Franc's daughter dances, strips; in dressing room, pulls off wig and fake eyelashes.
• Building: looks like the ballet school in Civic Center.
• Socratic questions: next day start a peculiar book full of Socratic questions: Why Does The World Exist?
• Recurring dream theme! Echoes Dinner with a Prodigy and Step By Step toward Sex two months ago, and Unready for Beach Girls last week.
• ACTION: None yet--the dream makes it clear I'm unready. But remember I'm heading this way. It's not that surprising; I'm a better composer than a musician. Up till now, I've written & played for experimental bands and played underground events. This suggests more openly highbrow and bigger-scale stuff. And predicts I'll find love in that highbrow crowd.

A teenage girl I know, with dark bangs, pale skin and strong cheekbones, has a lot of magical promise--but students of wizardry need both natural ability and long study.

She meets a slightly more powerful sorceress who's coming backward in time to meet her. Not sitting in a time-capsule or walking through a time-gate: she's doing it by living backward, her time-arrow reversed from our viewpoint. She arrives--though from her perspective I guess she's leaving; her last moment back in our time. She says goodbye. Well, she says yahbdoog. Talks backward. Walks backward. Eats backward... all pretty unsettling.

But ignore time's arrow, and I'm struck how similar they are--same black bangs and cheekbones. Are they related?

The girl I know was afraid she'd have to fight the reversed sorceress; but as they touch for the first time... they simply fuse.

Oh. That sorceress was her future self in reverse.

• Powerful, dangerous near-twin: in French cop show I saw, Marie (age 6) saw her dad brutally murdered. Grows up, learns to shoot, tracks and kills all four assassins. Becoming one herself.
• Time travel, meet aspect of yourself:
  1. On French cop show, Franc the detective learns he has an adult daughter he never knew existed.
  2. Me! in Acorn and Pelt, I met my soul-pelt as it traveled backward through time to me. That dream explained my illness & gloom then as my shamanic self grieving--it lives backward in time, so the beginning of magic for me meant, to it, a parting! That grief was auspicious--it proved our future'd be close! Similarly, this deliberate mention of future-self-come-back flags the dream as talking about my future self, like Dream 1. A rare type, a self-flagging dream.
• ACTION: patience. No need to fight. I'll become the shaman I foresee. And, apparently, the composer and choreographer.

Something similar but more complex happens with a spacy, unworldly, younger boy of talent. He encounters an older guy coming back through time. His future self too? But in this case, they both turn to animals--large rodents--big squirrels, I think.

Soon the kid gets sick, and spreads it to his human friends, including me. Feels like just a mild cold, but I'm uneasy. Is it more?

Yes. It's a virus with a hidden magical purpose: to inoculate by inserting a gene to resist a much more serious plague--the Black Death itself?--that the future one planned to spread! Modern medicine can quell such an epidemic once detected, but the kid prevents it from the start with his mild illness. Saves lives!

• Cold-virus is prophylactic: Catshall was ill, asked me to delay visit till I'm well; she beat cancer, but her immune system's weak; unwise to risk it. On the phone she vented her frustration with slow recovery...
• Turn into animals: Bertie in So Silver Bright. Her dad is a were-gull; she once managed to shift and fly, but so far she can't will it.
• So current sickness can protect me from a worse illness precognition can cause? What, future shock? Alienation from all those Carl Sagan types who don't believe in predictive dreams just because they haven't had one.
• ACTION: be patient, accept my limits; they protect my health! Or... become a small mammal. One of those two.

This felt, and still feels, like a major dream, predicting that as I heal from chronic illness--which may partly be chronological illness, a sort of shamanic illness born of future-shock--I'll grow from being a songwriter in a small experimental band to composing and choreographing in much larger and more mainstream venues. Well, mainstream for San Francisco. Maybe highbrow for most places. It wasn't arena rock and those ballerinas seemed, as a group, strongly gifted.

The issue of the gifted in masks, of needing masks, has haunted me since this dream: for example, Her Final Exam or Why I Lie.

Maybe I'll manage to sabotage this highbrow path years ahead. But the dream was so firm about it, I think it spotted a real trend down many time-branches. Treating this literally isn't naïve; note how Herself in Reverse and Squirrely Plague both directly show the future reaching back to impact the present! The dreams encourage interpretation as prophetic not metaphoric.

I've started a list of such self-flagging dreams declaring their own type--dreams that say in the dream that they're literal warnings not to be interpreted metaphorically; or dreams that mention lucid dreams, thus triggering lucidity; or dreams that talk of telepathy in the dream, prompting the dreamer to tell the dream and thus discover it was shared/telepathic.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
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