I live on a farm in peaceful Moomin Valley, near the mouth of a little winding river, where it enters the Gulf of Finland. One day, a traveling torturer comes by and sets up his little tent in the yard. I don't want his services, don't need any secrets pried out of anyone. But I have no say in it--if he finds no clients who want someone tortured, it's his traditional right to pick one of his hosts. I feel doomed already--I know what's coming.

Yes. Out of all the farm, he chooses me.

I threaten him with a leaking bike-pump, my only weapon, snarl "You don't want to know what this'll do to you!"

He ignores my empty threat and just waits. Hours pass, night falls. I try to stay awake but I'm so tired. I fall asleep at last.

And in my sleep, he comes to me. He must have given me a sleeping drug or anaesthetic, for as he carries me out to his tent and shackles me, I don't wake--not even at dawn, when he starts the vivisection.

When I do wake in the morning, I find myself staked out inside his tent, staring at my own flayed skin and guts arranged in an intricate display like a huge, bloody flower around me. I dreamily know that image is a quote from some book where a torturer's victim actually makes that comparison before dying. I'm numb enough to think about things like that--I feel no pain at all. I don't even notice how odd that is, for a so-called torturer's victim. I'm not tortured. Just dying.

It's weirdly pretty--all the colors, all the shapes--if I forget what they are and where they're from. Who they're from.

What is he really, a meat artist?

I've been dissected, I'm doomed, and I know it.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Bared nerves: yesterday I saw the French film When the Cat's Away. Lonely Chloe was looking for far more than a lost cat. It scraped a nerve--exposed too many of my own most painful issues. Came out feeling stressed, even sick.
• Wandering camper = Snufkin, from the Moomin books of Tove Jansson. He was probably my favorite character--shocking to see him turned here into a torturer.
• Snufkin = solitude, independence at any cost.
• So Snufkin the Wandering Solitary Torturer = habits that keep me away from love, just as Chloe in When the Cat's Away withdraws from men she's attracted to.
• Torturer with artistic license =
  1. a girl in my yoga class was reading Dan Simmons's Hyperion; it contains a figure called the Shrike, who impales its victims on a Tree that feeds them intravenously, forcing them to start developing a group mind...
  2. Humility Garden by F. Savage, a novel about art at any cost. Like using your brother as raw material for a statue...
• Body spread out, chained =
  1. Seeing When the Cat's Away was like seeing my own guts, my loneliness, spread out before me. Didn't feel sick at the time, but bad consequences!
  2. My yoga teacher said "don't try to relax in this position" (spreads arms and legs on back) "it's just too hard to trust the world THAT much." Looks like that's true, for me at least.

LATER THAT DAY

Due to the dream's warning, I treat myself gently all day. I avoid people, avoid stress, feeling as shy as one of Tove Jansson's little trolls. But it's too late--no use! I get very ill, for several days.

NEXT WEEK

In hypnotherapy, deep in trance, I ask my soul about this dream, and a dragon answers; a dragon who guards my past lives.

She says "Thisss wasssn't purely symbolic, but a memory too. Once, long ago, I died like thisss."

"What, you mean in a past life? That really happened once? To me?"

"Not every detail wasss like thiss, of courssse... but... yessssssss."

Oh. Ow! Oh.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites