I'm in a strange house alone when a package arrives for me. The delivery guy says "It's a paint kid." I assume he meant "paint kit", till I open the box. A huge paint kit all right, but velcroed into two nooks inside the lid are twin four- or five-year-old girls. They climb out and tell me "We can't ride bikes or drive yet, so we shipped ourselves to you so we could play!" They sound very precocious, as articulate as ten year olds, but then, they're prodigies--famous artists in fact--THE Paint Kids!

So they pop out of their Velcro pockets and open a lot of paint tubes and the next thing I know they're out of their screaming-pink jumpers too, naked and smearing paint all over and laughing. They paint some paper, they paint some wall, they paint each other, they paint me. Although they're famous artists, they don't seem to care about producing anything right now--instead, it seems they read my dreams on the net, and decided if I think gifted teens are sexy then twin five-year-old prodigies should be sexy too, because they start teasing me in a disturbingly adult way--utterly unlike any normal child. They rub up against me like puppies, grab my penis and paint it green and purple, trying to provoke an erection!

And to my shock and guilt, they get one. Despite myself, what they're doing feels good. The paint is so nice and buttery it's hard not to respond. One girl grabs my hand and puts it on her crotch. I start rubbing her, and slide my finger in. Slippery, easy, clearly painless--but IS that natural lubrication? Or... PAINT again?

And all the while, patiently, my other hand goes on... drawing them!

While they, intermittently, draw each other, and me.

Because they're artists too. And artists never, never, never stop.

Not for guilt, not for sex, not for anything.

THE EVENING BEFORE

I dreamed this after coming home from a party, a housewarming for a friend. Most people were younger than me (though socially more mature--I'm such a hermit). But they were nice, and I met several girls I was attracted to. But something strange happened. Two or three times, when I was talking with someone hot, these three older women I knew came over and interrupted us! I wondered if they were trying to protect the younger women from big bad me, then dismissed that as paranoid--they knew me, and I'm about as predatory as a rabbit.

Then I overheard two of them talking about their hosts: "They're just KIDS!" The tone made it clear--these fifty-somethings scorned the twenty-somethings--youth is a character flaw! They were saving me, from those awful, immature, boring children! Until, perhaps, I come to my senses and appreciate them... sourness and envy and all.

I also read Goleman's Emotional Intelligence today. He writes that those of us abused as kids often re-enact the trauma to detoxify it. We may sexualize nonsexual contact, and replay molestation--but under our initiation and control this time! My dream acted this idea out, showed me how actions looking perverse from outside can sometimes feel positive from inside--even healing.

The dream played with my worst fears--the idea that since I was abused I'll abuse kids in turn. By painting (ahem) the most outrageous scene possible and showing it as weirdly positive, my dreams are forcing me to decide for myself what's abuse and what isn't. My attraction to gifted art-geek girls in their teens and twenties is neither predatory nor pedophilia but just attraction plus shared interests--even if women older than me get all snotty about it.

THE DAY AFTER

So I assumed the art-sex-maniac-twins were partly the girls at the party, and partly me--my own inexperienced enthusiasm at the party, AND my childlike pleasure in painting. Every time I make a colorful mess, it feels like a happy orgy.

But the next day, on a date with an artist (twentysomething, not five) at the SF Zoo, we walked round a corner and bumped into the twin girls in my dream! Size, eyes, skin, hair... they matched right down to their magenta jumpers. Eerie.

THE EVENING AFTER

After the date, I couldn't sleep, and turned on TV--rare for me. Saw one of those home-video shows. So what do they show? A tape of a blonde five-year-old who ALSO looked just like a Paint Kid... and THIS little angel cheerfully smeared lipstick all over her mouth, cheeks, eyes, forehead, table, room, house... her own little paint orgy.

So I don't know. Instead of a symbolic dream, maybe it was a weird psychic salad of past and future events, a perverse mishmash mainly designed to get me lots of disapproving email if I put it on the Net.

So I put it on the Net. Because the Paint Kids would.

Artists.

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