I just read JK Rowling's Casual Vacancy. On the surface, it's about Brit-style child neglect. But it seems to me "casual vacancy" is how Rowling thinks small-town Brits treat themselves too. Such dreary lives--none are creative, spiritual, loved or loving. They lack purpose.

My chronic illness is nothing to envy, yet I wouldn't swap lives with any of those adults. Not one.

THAT NIGHT

Dream 1: HAPPY TRANSFORMATION

A lost dream of... the letter G, and some clever, colorful parrot-people, and benevolence, and transformations via spell. I make a mental note: "This dream is auspicious! Remember it!" But when I wake it's gone, washed away by the creepiness of...

Dream 2: NIGHTMARE TRANSUBSTANTIATION

I'm in a stark empty basement room; the only window, by the front door, looks out the concrete wall of a notch where this steep street's sidewalk descends over a meter below the street. It gives a little light, but it also means anyone can peer in the room! That disturbs me, since...

I'm naked--shivering, but with a huge erection. I'm about to fuck my lover--who's an animal. A large animal, maybe a pony or a wolf. It's hard to tell exactly, because she's dead--killed, bled, skinned, and dumped here. She's just a limp steaming mound of ropy red muscle sprawled on the concrete floor.

I'm supposed to fuck this poor murdered mare, bitch, girl... then build a fire, and roast her inseminated corpse, and eat her.

Worse yet, I have to do it all here where anyone can peer in and watch.

Worst of all, I know I've enacted this grisly ritual before. Regularly? What am complicit in?

THAT MORNING

I wake in a cold sweat, heart pounding. It's 4:30 AM and I can't get back to sleep.

Try reading. Grab a library book I just got--Kerry Greenwood's Medea, her take on the Greek tale of Jason and Medea. It opens with Jason being raised by Centaurs--but in Greenwood's demystified version, the Centaurs are a tribe of little Celts/Picts who believe they're half-horse. They reaffirm it yearly like this: the tribesmen fuck a sacred mare, then sacrifice her, eat her flesh and drink her blood.

I put the book down and numbly think: "Guys sure treat girls mean..."

It's their cruelty that shocked me, not that my nightmare predicted what I'd read at random. If anything, it was a relief to learn the nightmare arose not from personal evil but historic evil: the rites of Epona. Medea is fiction, but Greenwood did her homework; some Epona worshipers really did this (other tribes had their chief fuck a mare, then at year's end sparing HER but sacrificing HIM. Better? Even worse?)

ESP issues aside, this nightmare taught me something: I'm a primitive beast. If we fuck, we're mates. We may quarrel, we may break up, but it feels profoundly wrong to treat a mate as possession, prey... meat. Yet through history, some men have. Treated their girlfriends (of any species) exactly so.

For me, the horror wasn't blood or bestiality or necrophilia (or that this grisly rite was clearly the root of Christian rites of Communion). The horror was in the betrayal--even though she was dead, and wouldn't feel it, I knew I transgressed. It rubbed my nose in a horrible syllogism:

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