In Dream Africa, lions are different. Lions talk. Lions have hands. They're a fierce, fanged, maned, furred people. More patriarchal than our lions: adult males inspect cubs and have the right to judge and reject them. (But maybe that's just a ritualized version of alpha lions killing all cubs in the pride not their own. Maybe our lions will evolve such a ritual too, in deep time.)

This cub-inspection has an odd consequence: now and then, lions here will adopt a human cub.

A teenage adoptee into the Lion tribe explains the rules to me. She's just hitting puberty--gawky, long stork-legs. I'm a young man, not a child, for I've recently been through initiation; and I have a fiancee my age, a real woman with proud breasts, ready to have my children.

So I can't understand why the lion people are adopting me. Or why they chose this mere stick of a human girl to explain their ways to me... and why I stand for it. No, more than that. She doesn't hang around me. I hang around her. Something animal pulls me toward her, away from my human fiancee. This lion-girl just smells sexy.

I hope it's not just those herbs they use to repel lion lice.

I don't know what to do. I'm stuck between. All custom pulls me back to my betrothed; all instinct forward to the lion-girl. Torn! Why can't I decide? Am I weak? Am I insane?

I need to decide. Guess I'll have to have a talk with the scriptwriter--and convince the writer to let me decide. This isn't weakness. It's a scriptwriter milking our misery to amuse the audience.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• I just read "Kabloona", describing Inuit sex lives before Christian missionaries.
• Scripted sexual dramas: TV! Saw bits of two shows:
  1. A girl uses sex to coax her boyfriend into hosting a huge party at his parents' house while they're gone. She wants that party more than sex! He can't say no, but he can see it'll be a disaster...
  2. A woman comes home to find lover in the shower. She feels sexy and decides to slip in and join him. Oooops! He's not alone...

TEN YEARS LATER

Looking back, the dream seems literal--and predictive. From 2006-2008, I got involved in a triangle with two women who were both brilliant, weird as me, and... extremely feline. Prowled and stretched like leopards, like lions. Friends commented "she's so catlike." Felt so attracted to their feline energy I just couldn't say no... or choose. For two years.

Lots of torrid drama. Guess that's what my scriptwriter thought the audience wanted.

Wait... scriptwriter? Audience?

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