Call me Ishi. You won't have heard of my tribe; we're supposed to be extinct. We find a low profile is safer. My relatives will kill me if I give hints, so I'm sticking with just "Ishi", that's practically John Running Doe here in Northern California.

So anyway, I'm walking down a busy street when I spot a man I know, a dark craggy-faced funny-looking little guy, who's from the same tribe I'm from. I'll call this guy "Mr. Snoid", since he always drives this tiny electric car, smaller than a golf cart, zooming among the pedestrians like R. Crumb's crazy little cartoon character Mr. Snoid.

I haven't seen old Snoid in years, why it's been... what, fifty? A hundred? Now, wait a minute, it can't be a century!

And then I realize it HAS been a century--the other direction. Ahead, not back. See, Snoid's a time traveler. And so am I. Our tribe invented time travel, but kept it to ourselves. No telling what damage you whites would do with it (and you Asians would just make money. Sorry, but you know it's true. You'd pollute the timescape--or clearcut time completely.)

All of us travelers have been discreet--till now. But Snoid's a real trickster, and time travel is no place for jokes. He scares me. But we can't just take his toys away--he's the guy who discovered how to do it.

He admits to me "I blew it, I wrote the secret down in a notebook. I gotta go, gotta get to another time zone. Be a friend and pick up that book for me, will you?" And Snoid is gone.

I'm angry with Snoid, but I do it. Dangerous to the balance, not to.

I track his book to the house of a rich white woman.

I knock. I'm not Snoid, to play games. She lets me in, soon as she sees me. She knows, I can see that.

She admits it. "As soon as I read this, I knew people could do a lot of damage with time machines. The secret mustn't be spread around casually. I got some offers--I could easily get millions for it. But I turned them all down. No one's threatened me yet, but if they do, I'll destroy it rather than let it fall into dishonest hands." She seems decent enough, but bored and maybe a little lonely. Now she's getting attention, drama.

What she doesn't realize is how many powerful men have found out she has the secret. She was so easy to find because every crook and cop in the state is sniffing around her. She sits by an open window and reads, and telephoto lenses record blurred, foreshortened pages in the hope of reconstructing the secret. And if someone does break in, they could just shoot her before she has a chance to destroy the book. She has no idea what's skulking out there. I'm afraid she's gonna die.

Like the men who threaten her, I've been an underworld figure myself--traveling in time, I've often needed fake ID and such. Plus, I know how the FBI treats our people. So it goes against all my instincts... but I grit my teeth and call the FBI, and leave them a tip about the guys after the book.

Because she won't believe me about the danger. And if I don't call in the Feds, she's gonna get murdered.

WAKING NOTES

• I'm a Northern California native like the original Ishi: true. Read Ishi's biography by Theodora Kroeber. By the way, Ishi means just "man" in Yahi--he didn't speak his true name, which was the custom among the Yahi. Discretion, anonymity. So by naming myself Ishi, I may also be standing for conscience, for spirit. Or for the patience it takes, living amid a horde of loud, unthinking whites.
• I fear other races will time-travel irresponsibly = Ishi saw whites as rowdy spiritual children--as the charming savages they are!
• The reckless "Snoid"--the side of me that's brainy, hyperactive and restless, the Anglo-culture side, inventing without responsibility, angry the moment they don't get their candy. Crumb describes his Snoid character as "pure Freudian Id."
• Time travel = I just saw a film on Allen Ginsberg's long life, moving through decades of social tumult. Or is it about my psychic dreams, predicting the future?
• Keep time-travel secret = keep my mouth shut about predictive dreams? Don't rock the Enlightenment boat?
• Trickster who invented time travel = 1: Ginsberg, that gentle, unselfish clown. 2: R. Crumb's Mr. Snoid = the Id, a passionate, utterly selfish clown. 3: Today I saw my friend Stanley, who's a crude, generous, reckless clown. Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry clowns! But clowns all.
• Book of secrets = my deviant dreams! In Ginsberg's biography... the cops read his poetry and got a court order forcing him to see a shrink! Welcome to America, land of the free. Just not of the free verse.
• Rich woman = I grew up in a quiet suburb. I underestimate the controversiality of my dreams, or how violent men can get--at least under capitalism.
• Go against history and habits by tipping off the FBI = I've been chronically ill, and some of it seems to be psychological. So, despite my mistrust of shrinks and their ideology, I finally I called my first therapist today, looking for someone who can help. And, to my surprise, my dreams approve.

The therapist I settled on dug up heavy family stuff, but she also pushed me to test medical hypotheses too. I eventually found, from fasting and adding foods back one by one, that my doctors, who had insisted their tests showed I wasn't sensitive to wheat, were wrong; I was violently and consistently allergic to wheat, oats and barley. Half my health problems vanished overnight.

I later learned such severe gluten sensitivity is common with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic disorder (rare, but known for over a century) which I had all the symptoms of, but which healthcare professionals had also failed to diagnose--for half a century. I self-diagnosed and proved it to them.

During these same years, as I did for myself what organized medicine failed to, I was also collecting over a thousand instances of telepathic, shared, or predictive dreams--a phenomenon dismissed as superstition by those stout protectors of science, rationality and the Enlightenment--Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker. All those confident white guys! Confident and wrong.

So I'm not real big these days on Enlightenment expertise.

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