I walked through a gate to another world. Now I have to figure out where and when I am.

It's almost dawn; the sky's already a luminous aqua. I'm standing on a hillside, California I think: steep hills and canyons, with golden grass and round oaks on the dry slopes and sober green redwood, pine, and laurel on the shady slopes. But balmy even now at dawn, and the slopes are feathered with palms. Northern California after centuries of greenhousing! So it's the future?

Crowds are scurrying around setting up tents on the flat below me. Looks like a fair. A man passing me on the trail smiles and says "There are two springs ahead, one with good water, one not. I'll show you which." Other hikers collect and follow us, amazed he'd share such a valuable trade secret. Why, he could run his own caravan!

Here come the elephants. Two of them, with riders... And a string of camels, too, all heading into the flat where banners start rising with the sun. It seems primitive and futuristic at once. People are different, but I can't pin it down to anything consistent. But I sense it. What am I missing? What's changed?

I find out at sunset.

This annual fair relies on this night. Once a year, people Change, particularly the young. A rite of passage. Whatever the change is, it works fast: thousands of young people will acquire the powers that mark them as adults, in this one night.

I watch a young woman change in front of me. She's acquiring the power to change shape, to become a wolf. In her, it manifests from the core outwards, starting in her womb. She feels a lone-wolf sexual confidence, an aggressiveness she's never had. She says "I feel masculine--I never understood guys so well before." The attitude change seems a little dangerous to me, since she'll still be the one getting pregnant if she's not careful. A mental sex change without a physical one: risky! But she likes it, likes that she has a wolf's estrus cycle, in heat on this hot night, drawing every wolf for miles to her, two-legged and four. Men don't know why they find her so exciting now, what the wildness is they scent. But she knows. Though she's in heat, she doesn't feel at all like she's at the mercy of her body: this is a transition, and when it's done, when she's all wolf, then she'll have the power to change back and forth, human or wolf, horny or not--not a curse, but a power and a choice.

The change often manifests differently in men. Women generally transform from the core outward, men often from the edges inward.

I'm the edgy type. I can feel change creeping in from my fingers and toes. My genitals and guts will be the last to change, not the first.

But already my transformation, too, feels psychologically like a sex change. I feel intense longings for women around me, but I stay passive and anxious, hoping they'll notice me, responding with excitement if they do, but only responding, never initiating. Like a Good Girl from the 1950s! No women come flocking around me, wanting to pet me, as males do around the wolf girl. Still, though it's dull, I know that this attitude is just a stage, a by-product of an incomplete transformation; it's not a character flaw, or a gender problem. When the process finishes, I'll be able to transform at will into...

something.

But WHAT? I'm not sure... A unicorn?

Whatever it is, and bad though my own transformation feels so far, I know these people are right to honor this night. The power to step out of your own species is true adulthood. Going past manhood isn't important.

Going past humanity is.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Shapeshifters: I just read two VERY different books: Marya by Joyce Carol Oates and A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony. Marya was emotionally crippled by not knowing who her real parents were, but after a long time dormant, she starts to change. In Chameleon what defines adulthood is not age or maturity but magical talent; the hero is magicless, while the heroine Chameleon has too much, transforming inadvertently.
• Till recently, I felt like this dream-woman whose change starts in her womb [=creativity] and pussy [=sex], spreading last to the hands [= holding others or pushing them away: social choices!]... Like her, I've been unfolding inside, bolder franker and livelier, while I've neglected my outer life; it's more passive than ever.
• But the dream seems to predict that my male side needs another process: first a passivity in hands and feet [=socializing and travel], then a need for others to take the initiative spreading to my guts [=feelings] and penis [=sex]. I want to BE held, admired, fucked, loved... but I won't act on my longings! Not while transforming.
• The dream's dualism is complex--two selves here, each acquiring the power to have two forms: four different forms! Suspiciously Jungian--are they the four Jungian functions, thinking feeling sensing and intuition? Struggling uneasily for balance now that they're all awake... But all of them require external quietude while I transform.

Patience. Patience. Patience.

2002 NOTE

I posted this dream mainly to pose this question:

Consider your flaws, things you're desperately ashamed of, that you struggle to change before they ruin your life. Is it possible some of those fatal flaws are just ephemeral symptoms of transition?

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