THAT DAY

Wake up sore again. Ow. Lyme disease flaring up despite antibiotics. Or because of them.

Then I chip a tooth--part of the tip of my lower right incisor shears off, and the chip disappears!

Try to modernize the World Dream Bank--I wrote some of the core pages as much as twelve years ago. Shorten the "Send Me a Dream" and "What This Site Is" pages. Slow. A lot of pages, it'll take time...

Make a new list for cryptomnesic dreams--dreams that recall complex, consciously long-forgotten data.

Walk with my friend the poet Patagia. She's in a mood today. Disliked the book I gave her (Josh Kornbluth's Red Diaper Baby, and the BBC show I recommended (Doc Martin), and dislikes my new sculpture project (a dance troupe of centaurs made from pairs of glued-together Barbies). Everything upsets Patagia today, so I don't take it to heart. And at least I'm getting some exercise.

At sunset, my housemates Alder and Cory invite me out to the Blue Elephant for Thai soup. The soup and friendship are warm, but I start to feel uneasy--I should be somewhere! This is Thursday the ninth, isn't it? Only when I get home do I find I'm wrong, it's Friday--and I just missed the vocal improv group I go to! Damn! Have to wait two more weeks...

Read over my dreams for the week. They're clearly unhappy with my present life. What to do?

THAT NIGHT

When my parents were young, Grandma Musser nagged my dad to make a lot of money and buy a big house or she wouldn't approve their marriage. A bit late; my parents already had three kids! But she threatened just the same; and said the only way to earn so much so fast was to assassinate President Obama, OR to shoot the snipers already set up to kill him on his visit to Seattle. She says "I don't care whose side you work for, as long as you get paid to kill SOMEONE."

My father is understandably reluctant to risk either proposal.

But his kids and friends take Gramma Musser seriously, and risk it. Three privately decide to go foil the snipers (none are Reaganites like Grandma, so they reject her hints she'd personally pay them to HIT Obama). Each gets a gun and sets out on foot to the rally plaza near Lake Washington, in Seattle. Or is it Lake Washington? It looks more dramatic--promontories and cliffs, crags reflecting in the water. Obama will speak from one by the waterside.

Our three counter-assassins:

• A ten-year-old gifted boy with dark buzzcut hair. And a revolver, hid in a shopping bag of confetti.
• A ravenhaired solemn girl, a little smaller, equally brilliant. An adult's with her, but not in on her plan I think. Neither am I. No weapon visible, but she's smart enough to hide whatever she's got.
• A chubby twenty year old guy, a techie, in a stained T shirt and shorts, draped in phones, blinkers & mics like a smalltime reporter. But his vidcam is really a homebuilt laser powerful enough to kill.

Two snipers are watching from a footbridge, with telescopic rifles. One spots the adult with the girl and fires, killing with one bullet. The boy spots another killer near him in the crowd, and brings up his gun. But one of them fires first and drops him. He never had much chance against pros. I have hopes for the girl--she's been warned now, and is small enough to hide in the crowd. But the snipers up on the bridge spot her from above and kill her with a single shot. I feel despair.

I spot a third sniper, a huge tattooed man. His oversize rifle has a spindle-shaped bulge at the muzzle. Probably not a silencer, since he's on a military chopper hovering over Lake Washington. A recoil damper? Either it fires explosive or superheavy rounds, or it's some kind of small rocket launcher. Either way, military grade. And he's aiming at the crag where Obama will soon appear.

How many assassins are there? Are these even related or have MULTIPLE organizations decided to kill Obama?

The guy in the chopper spots the geek. He's up on a rock, craning his neck at the bridge, seeking the snipers who just shot the kids. He doesn't notice the dancing red dot on his T shirt--the targeting laser of the guy in the chopper. But a Secret Serviceman does. Can't trace its source, but makes a quick desperate decision: aims his own weapon at the geek's face, flashing his own targeting laser to get the geek's attention! Flicks it off as the geek looks around...

Instantly, Geek zeroes in on the chopper, the tattooed man, and with shocking speed raises his home-made laser and fires. He must have been practicing obsessively for months. Years! The beam instantly blinds the tattooed sniper; he fires back, and his massive round arrives a fraction of a section later and blasts a chunk off the top of a crag. The wrong crag. Blind, he missed!

The geek doesn't. He holds his laserbeam steady a few seconds. Smoke emerges from the open chopper door, then flame. The copter lurches as the engine fails; it sags toward shore. Will it crash on the crowd? No. Down into the lake. Splash!

There are still assassins on shore, but now the Service is alert. Obama is saved!

I still grieve for those murdered kids. Especially that brilliant girl. I wanted to marry her when she grew up.

But it looks like Geek Boy's the one to back! Practice at home, on your home-made toys; later, it'll save your life, among the murderous pros. Who'll underestimate you.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• "Make money fast", "make a killing": echo last night's dream, Zillionaire's Tower
• Obama: I think the Great Compromiser means timid attempts to change my life.
• Grandma Selfish. I think she's a side of me who basically threatens "Either adopt a me-first attitude, or I'll sabotage even timid attempts at change."
• Boy genius: 1: I expanded the notes to Lucky Starr today; to do that I had to come out as a child prodigy myself. 2: I've been watching FIREFLY, the TV series by Joss Whedon. The boy may be Simon as a child--a prodigy but shy with girls.
• Girl genius: River, Simon's brilliant little sister, has a flashback to her school days before the government abducted and tortured her. River and I share crucial traits: abused outside the family, IQ off the scale, evidence of ESP--predictive dreams in my case, waking telepathy in hers.
• Guns: River's half crazy from government torture; in one scene she thinks she's holding a tree branch when it's a gun.
• Assassins: a literal warning Obama will be attacked in Seattle? Hope not. I think it's about my illness, but rightwing vitriol toward Obama has been so openly murderous that assassination attempts wouldn't surprise me.
• Lake with cliffs and craggy islets: in the French animation MIA ET LES MIGOUS, a chopper fires missiles and burns the Tree of Life--a scene Hollywood director James Cameron stole and stuck in AVATAR a year or two later! So it may hint "this is just a symbolic movie set"--not warning of literal murders but a murderous inner conflict. Or, of course, "dreams like to plagiarize."
• Tattooed killer in the chopper: reminds me of that figure in Jung's famous 1913 nightmare Siegfried Must Die. Jung himself thought it was the will to power already evident in German culture but didn't, at the time, see it as warning of the world wars to come. My dream figure uses military weapons so he probably means militarism of some kind--my immune system, or my fears of being attacked (I was bashed in school for years so my trust level's low). And yet...
• The snipers who kill the two kids may be civilian rightwingers unconnected with the military guy. If they too are inner figures, I wonder who they are--a side that hates ALL change?
• Secret Service lacks the range to hit the assassin in the chopper: antibiotics don't easily reach and kill off well-established Lyme; I was first given antibiotics for this forty years ago! They always knock it back but never kill it off. Drugs alone can't do the job.
• Secret Service uses targeting laser to alert a guy with a (homemade!) weapon that CAN hit the assassin: stimulating the immune system when you can't kill a disease organism directly. So keep taking immune-strengthening herbs, not just antibiotics! My eventual cure may be home-made--but with prompts from a professional, or in addition to antibiotics.
• Murderous pros: prose? The notoriously difficult publishing industry! I haven't even tried yet to go commercial with my dream paintings, comix, poems or songs. Keep polishing them...
• ACTION 1: Be like Geek Boy who saves Obama: polish your skills at home! Practice piano, polish my art and writing... and keep trying Lyme treatments; the answer will be home-made! Drill NOW will really pay off... suddenly.
• ACTION 2: Be like the Secret Serviceman too--focus on strengthening my own immune system, not on killing off disease organisms per se. I haven't got the firepower. But my body may...

THREE DAYS LATER

The violence in this dream foresaw my worst Lyme attack in months. The new drug I'm taking caused a Herxheimer reaction: killed off so many Lyme parasites at once that their death throes released a flood of inflammatory toxin. Malaria-like symptoms for days.

SEVEN MONTHS LATER

I went through four waves of Herxheimer reaction as I upped the dosage of antibiotics. Each one ebbed leaving me better off than before. Now I'm better than I have been in years. No question that Western medicine helped--in its violent way--but the herbs and diet I'm following (list) turned out to be equally vital, both to cope with the toxicity and to keep the parasites suppressed. (If you have any chronic disease of mysterious origin, this list may be useful).

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