THAT DAY

My sister Althea comes by to play me a new song, telling a dream of making love in a cherry bin at a roadside fruit stand. Wow, life really IS a bowl of cherries! Other listeners just said it's "nice" and found it forgettable. I think the song is sexy, funny, vivid--it's her even, drifty, dreamy singing that's the problem, so I suggest a more matter-of-fact voice, and starting with Verse 2 where the action begins, and build to the, ahem, climax. I ask her to send me the lyrics and/or a recording; I want to put this on the World Dream Bank. Just too funny.

That evening: insomnia. All that green tea at dinner, I guess. I thrash around in pillows. Get turned on, but don't come--feel strangely dehydrated despite all that tea. Oh. Low fever. Probably been losing water all day--never a sweat, just steady evaporation... Take aspirin. Still hot, achy, can't sleep.

So I get up and scan photos of Yeats and Maud Gonne, and his poem about a dream she had that they were enslaved siblings in a past life. Her dream makes as much sense as any other explanation I've seen for their bizarre loves and lives... At last, exhausted, I stagger to bed again and finally sleep.

THAT NIGHT

A great library. Stone stories. Round lightwells where we love to lean on hardwood arcs of rail and watch the heads swim far below: Koi in a literate pail. Though in dark side-rooms reserved for briefings airless, crime-fighting agents slinkily convene to mutter and stare at secrets Oh, wait-- I'm one! We track the saboteurs who plant the little disk-bombs. The trainees of our task-force peruse a captured coin-trove big as silver dollars, but blank. Dial one up, and you can maim a man, or crack a bank. Worse yet: lose a disk, and innocents think it's change--and pick it up! They're prey for stray Radio waves. And really are even our crippled samples safe? Our lanky mentor queries "Agents! What do you each propose?" But during discussion, my unease grows and grows and grows! I fear a spy among us. Oh, wait-- We're all spies here; I mean saboteur. That new girl I admire-- ironic eyes and seal-sleek hair. I think she's a secret double, here to regain the bombs. So I snatch them up and run! Where can I disarm (or deny her at least) the coins before a phonecall blows us all to rubble? The sky-wide lightwells lure, but if I toss a silver shower the folk below will snatch at change --my treacherous largesse-- only to learn in fire and pain explosive change is trouble. Oh, wait-- Two blue eyes on the back lawn! One long, pale, laned and swimmered, one small, deep and diverless, ideal for dousing death. A luminous four-meter bluesunk cube. Splash! I coin a wish: "May all bombs bathe." Now they're a sea-floor hoard: drops of sky-silver wink and flirt from cerulean bottombeach in fishnets of ripple-light. We jump in after, but clothes buoy, balloon into huge air-jellyfish tugging us back up. Curse the bubbles, strip, tear, rip to rags, dive bare down till skin frog-mottles, pales. Wrestle, wriggle like partisan eels. How sleek she feels in fight! Our limbs in moray knots athrash. Yet she nor I the trove can reach. Not tangled tight in counterspy. Oh, wait-- This girl's slippery, octopus hot! I love her, skin and sin. We tongue and fingers in, and soon I mount my roaring seal-girl on the terrace lawn. All gasp and moan. She howls "I can't do this, your boys will come and take me." I say "I know, love. Run; I'll stall them. Please, for me, try not to kill anyone? Oh, wait-- Why not ask your bosses to rob all those bailed-out bankers next? Sutton said "It's where the money is." Plus you'd be folk heroes-- we all hate them too, God knows." She laughs "Okay!" and antelopes away. So golden-thighed. And I suppress an urge to cry "Oh, wait--" I loved my rival spy. I wanted more than blues with her. I woke up wondering why, why this dream. What to infer?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Various floors: spiritual planes! We meet in an class upstairs (astral plane?), wrestle in a pool of dreams (collective unconscious?), fuck on the physical plane. Which all echoes Yeats and Maud Gonne's dream-experiments, political struggles and messy sex lives...
• Explosive disks: four recent nightmares I've been unable to write as Dreamverses. Explosive material, but I don't understand their warnings. (NOTE A YEAR LATER: here's one of the four: My Mother's Closet)
• Change: a running pun in my dreams. Small change(s), buried change, accruing change... and here, explosively lethal change.
• Don't toss change down a lightwell, may harm readers: don't toss nightmares onto the net without understanding them!
• Change is unsafe in a dry library, but a pool defuses it: I'm dehydrated. Drink not think!
• Spies, lovers, political games: WB Yeats and Maud Gonne in Irish revolutionary politics.
• Attractive enemy: maybe my ex-girlfriend Cheryl (she certainly thinks so). But we broke up months ago; what current ambivalence does the dream point at?
• Sex by pool: an answer to Althea's dream-song! Life isn't a bowl of cherries, not for me: it's a pool of explosive change! Hints I'll only find love outside conventionalism.
• Hmmm. Is this an astral tryst with...
  1. A side of my ex I like? Am I asking this side to intercede with the side that blasted apart our friendship? Or am I...
  2. Befriending a side of me I thought was only a saboteur making me sick? Not sure.
• Her crime-bosses, violence for gain: maybe Cheryl's tough businesslike side, which I see as grim ruthless paranoid. But then I haven't had a lucrative job in years. Maybe I'm soft.
• Rob those bailed-out bankers: friends of mine argue "Don't bail out crashing banks." My dreams seem to go further: tax the fat cats till we regain the billions they stole.
• Sutton said: Willie Sutton, bankrobber, was supposedly asked "Why banks? They're so well defended!" and answered "That's where the money is."
• ACTIONS: Drink fluids, it soothes these sudden inflammations. And give myself time to tackle those nightmares--I've been busy and driven. Picking up small change is good, but bigger change can be... explosive.
• This is Dreamverse #32. I'm resuming after a week of illness. Cautiously. We'll see...
  So we did. The next day I had a violent flare-up, the sickest I've been in months. Boom!

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