WHAT PROVOKED THE DREAM

Morning

I just read a peculiar book: Clio Cresswell's Mathematics and Sex, applying game-theory logic to dating and relationships. Four of its insights struck me hard:

1. Assertion--even complaining--stabilizes relationships. Forbearance just promotes breakup!
2. Polarization happens. Slight differences in how you clean house, tip waiters, or discipline kids slowly exaggerate in response to your partner's seeming excess or indifference, till one of you does all the cleaning or parenting or finances. Clio's remedy: alternate, or flip a coin, and the winner does it this time--by their rules.
3. Between lovers, small gestures--sexy or just affectionate--can rekindle things spectacularly. Positive feedback loop!
4. Partners of unequal attractiveness as your social circle judges this are unstable; others snipe and try to steal the hottie. According to Clio's math, I should ignore the tall busty blondes Americans overrate, and go for short dark small-breasted girls--who I like just as much. And of course I should totally indulge my taste for braaaaains... since (despite zombie legend) 300 million shambling American morons don't crave brains--they fear 'em.

I drive my housemate Alder to a friend's house--they'll carpool to a storytelling festival in the Sierra Nevada. As long as I'm near Oakland, I visit my friends Bob & Catherine, but it's hell getting there--just ten miles, but the freeway's gridlocked. At lunchtime! I take small streets. Slow, hot, every light against me. Takes forever, and I ache and feel feverish from the base of my skull all down my spine. Damn. I have a recurring fever (Lyme?) and I've triggered a mild attack.

Afternoon

I stay there till my fever fades. We talk of Gertrude Stein--Catherine wrote her master's thesis on Stein. A local girl who swapped Oakland for Paris. Wouldn't you?

And yet... we have dinner at a great Laotian restaurant, Champa Garden. A local hangout for young couples and singles. Some very hot girls in goofy ensembles. Bob and Cath both girlwatch openly, making me feel less shy to. Nothing cheers me up like bisexual bohemians, Lao salads and a multigenerational parade of weirdos--I actually felt at home. On planet Earth! Gertrude, your obituary for Oakland was premature: there is a there there--just not downtown. The life's in the 'hoods, now.

Evening

Go home with a Tarot deck, an old Ethernet board for our housemate Cory's computer, homegrown lettuce, windfall oranges, and a T shirt depicting The Hanging Bunny (don't ask). It's after rush hour, and I zoom like a gull over the bridge to San Francisco.

Just before bed I read a fantasy tale, Dragon's Teeth. A queen saved the life of a gutter kid named Paulus. Now he's captain of her guard, determined to save her from a sinister minister. But first he has to slay a dragon...

But I'm too sleepy to go on. I close the book and turn off the light. But soon I find myself in another book...

THE DREAM

Coyote's Giant Lover

Patricia McKillip has a new fantasy novel out. I haven't read it yet, just glanced through. A new experiment for her: it has illustrations. Just sketches, really, but their content is startling. Three of them show an encounter in a mountain valley: a gigantic Coyote, clearly the Trickster himself, finds and makes love with an equally gigantic hermitess with wild hair and a ragged smock...

Two loners, no longer alone. But our lovers soon discover pine-tops make a prickly bed. Ow, ow, ow...

The archetypal trickster, poked!

The Storyteller

Next I head for a fantasy/science fiction convention where a crowd of McKillip's fans dress up as characters from the new book. Most of these cosplayers are teenage girls dressing as the half-dozen sheltered court ladies who in the book must venture out into the wilds to save their country--discovering their strength(s) as they go.

McKillip herself is here, but to my surprise she's often slower than the fans to recognize who the models are trying to depict (despite their lovingly elaborate costumes). But then McKillip's at a unique disadvantage: she knows these characters! She inevitably pictured a face, build, and body language for each character, and it's often unlike the fan wearing it.

Also, some fans are just too young to carry off adult roles--they don't yet look the part. Though since McKillip writes for the gifted, not a mass readership, even her youngest fans play their parts quite intelligently. Elfin courtiers.

Everyone recognizes The Storyteller instantly, despite her player's deliberate inauthenticity. In the book, Storyteller wore a long gown typical of the court, but with a shockingly atypical motif: the black silhouette of a vulture (on a carcass, in profile) on the front of her skirt.

But this fan's left the gown plain. Instead, the black silhouette of a huge raven peers inquisitively over her left shoulder, on a sort of shawl; her right shoulder is a spread wing. It's as if she's under the protective wing of a huge living bird-spirit.

It's as startling and distinctive as a vulture gown, and fitting her character better, if anything. Plus, this girl (the cosplayer I mean) has a strong aura--intelligent, sexy, dashing, ravenhaired--a perfect Storyteller.

Hot, too.

Sigh! But then so many of them are. Too hot; intimidating. I feel too shy to talk to any.

Sit on a Hob

Now I'm playing in a scene from the new book. Not roleplaying--I really am a girl at court! I'm thin, a bit frail, and awkward because I'm unused to these long slender classic gowns. They look fabulous but you just can't run in them. I feel like a wild horse caught and hobbled.

Days pass in the dream, but I still feel ill at ease in my new body. Incarnation takes time.

One day, up in the palace nursery, I'm having a heart-to-heart talk with two friends, when I hear a faint scrape and sense movement beneath me. I think a bogle or hob is hiding under my friend's chair!

Oh, I can clearly see the empty floor between its plain wooden legs, but the old lore says a few hobs are more than unobtrusive--they can go truly invisible, even to a knowing eye.

So I pounce, toppling the chair. Feel something squirmy! Grab and sit on it. Aha!

The hob tries to bite and claw me, but it can't--my gown is tight-woven silk. Tough stuff.

The damn gown is good for something at last!

Is my invisible hob-catch just nosy, or was it spying on someone's behalf? This IS court...

Folklore back in my home town said "Catch a hob, get your wish." I intend to find out if it's true.

Maybe our little snoop will be bound by the rules of his own magic to grant me one...

The Lemon Guards Wed

Now I'm watching the climactic scene of McKillip's new book: all the court ladies, not just the main characters, go shopping together in a cooperative grocery. Their carts are half full of produce, when...

...in sweeps a troop of the royal guard, in eye-searing lemon-yellow uniforms. They dance round the ladies and their shopping carts like giant orioles begging for crumbs. Aggressive orioles: they wrest the carts from the ladies, pick them up and pop them in their own carts like purchases!

The court ladies mime astonishment but not alarm, for each guard has miraculously chosen his True Love, and since this is a musical, all love is instantly requited. At least during the dance!

Now small children appear from nowhere, wholesome and photogenic. They hop in too, one or two to a cart! As the number comes to its musical climax, the guards roll their instant nuclear families past the cashiers (who are baffled how to ring them up, as courtiers and kids lack price stickers).

Out of the store, they disperse, seeking new family homes, also acquired, I have no doubt, for a song. A Hollywood song.

A mate for everyone. If declassé...

Rise Above the Cops

I'm male now, and at a different dance--outdoors, in a modern street. We're a spillover crowd from a dance club whose stage is half indoors and half in the street. The band is highly danceable, but bland. A tall girl comments to me "They seem to have lost their creative edge."

I say "Were they ever good? I think we're just so far from the drum-beat now, the dance-trance is fading. Now we hear their limitations."

Strangely, the performers call themselves the Incredible String Band, though their monotonous dance techno is the exact opposite of the String Band's complex experimentalism in the sixties and seventies.

Two guys come round the corner and stare at me. One snickers to his friend "Twinkle-toes!" So they find my dancing funny? I start leaping, try truly ridiculous capers, holding myself at the peak of each leap longer than Newton would consider legal. Just barely, but I'm cheating gravity.

Now a diagonal line of riot cops comes slowly across the street! Push us back. No announcement to disperse, no explanation, no attack, just a steady push. But I've already proved I can levitate. I creep upward, slowly feeling my way into the air. Not easy. But at last my center of gravity's at head-height and rising. A little more and I'll be above the reach of their clubs--though not bullets. Yet they haven't been aggressive...

Yet.

Do I want to risk crossing their line to find out who or what they're displacing us for?

And hovering right on the line, I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Patricia McKillip: one of my favorite authors. Her work's as psychological, surreal and slipstream as the best of Rushdie or Byatt. Hmm... what if the dream's literal--does she have a new book out?
• Illustrations: my friend Cory tried Photoshop for the first time today
• Coyote and the Hermitess: two sides of me? I am very much a hermit. In the next scene, the Trickster reappears in another classic form: Raven!
• The plot--courtiers find strange strengths in the wild: a prompt to head for the wilderness? Or is it literal--a book-plot McKillip has been working on?
• Cute teens in costumes: hotties in that Laotian restaurant. Wasn't just cute bodies--some had quite imaginative ensembles. My shyness keeps me from flaunting my style. Maybe it's time to wear my dreams!
• The Storyteller: the storytellers at Alder's festival? Me as a dream-teller? McKillip herself?
• Vulture vs Raven: both eat carrion. But I'd rather hear Raven stories any day. Maybe a side of me I used to disdain because she liked to shock, who's cleaned up her act a bit? Like ravens themselves; here in San Francisco they went from Grim Reapers to comedians in a single generation.
• Invisible but palpable spy under chair: my illness? My shyness?
• Hob'll, hobble: pretty contrived dream-pun. Why? Ooh, I know! Rival fantasy author Robin Hobb is sneaking ads into my dreams! Stop that, Robin! The World Dream Bank is ad-free! So I squash that Hobb...
• My tight court-gown hobbles me, but I make it a weapon: the tight discipline of femininity has power--if you're astute enough to figure out how to use it. Pouncing and getting close seem to work. Dream advice! I've been too shy to pounce on anyone lately.
• Mere guards marry court ladies?: in Dragon's Teeth, Paulus the guard-captain loves the Queen. Saving her life might make his dream come true.
• The women want the men as much as vice versa: A lesson I forget. I grew up assuming most women didn't LIKE guys--thanks, Mom! (I now think my mom was gay and didn't even know; back in her day, you got married and had babies, regardless of your feelings.)
• Street, cops: Berkeley gridlock. When I detoured, a cop held me up while a long slow funeral procession passed.
• Line of cops push back dancers: how I felt today as inflammation spread down my spine. "The party's over!"
• Dance helps me slowly learn to fly: yoga and dance are good for me?
• If I cross the police line, they may shoot me:
  1. Today proved that doing too much can trigger a relapse of my illness
  2. A string of my dreams have had macho cops and guards forbidding me to
     • have fun, especially social or sexual
     • access early or traumatic memories
• ACTION 1: Check to see if McKillip does have a new book out.
• ACTION 2: Give up on passing for normal. Dress (and act) like me.
• ACTION 3: Go to the next fantasy con that McKillip attends. If she ever does...
• ACTION 4: Do more yoga and dance. But I'll have to be cautious.
• ACTION 5: Act on hunches... and pounce. If I dare to, my intuition may grant me wishes!
• ACTION 6: Wear bright colors and go to Rainbow Grocery and find true love among the vegetables? I guess...
• ACTION 7: Email the dream to McKillip? She might just write Lost in Raven Wood. Naw, I'm too shy. Well, maybe I'll get the nerve to cross that line someday...

How about it, O beloved readers? Ideas?

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