International Association for the Study of Dreams 2004 Psiberdreaming Gallery

01/31/2000

#1236

BIND HIM AS HE WOULD BE BOUND, STRETCH HIM AS HE STRETCHES

Sue C., a tall and rather masculine woman, and I are binding a brown haired, young man using strips and laces of leather. Our intention is to use these bindings to lift him. He keeps complaining about the way we are binding him -- not the fact we are binding him but critical of our technique. Annoyed, I consider threatening to wrap his balls and lift him by them, then decide against it. He demands we tie his hands behind his back. I tell Sue I don’t think we can lift him that way without injuring him whereupon he becomes clamorously insistent. We oblige, tying his hands, then he leans backwards into our arms. Once he is more-or-less prone between us we rotate his arms so that his hands are above his head. As we do so we hear a loud popping coming from his shoulders. He doesn’t react but Sue says, “Ouch!” loudly, then as we continue to rotate his arms to the front of his body she says with amazement, “But they work!” I see a cylindrical contraption of brushed silver with thin, black, vertical bands holding its top and bottom together. Inside this device I see the young man being stretched.

(I was disturbed by my role as torturer in this dream but in working with it I found my focus shifting from my dreaming self to that of the victim. The following poem is the result of a conscious dreaming interview with him).

BIND HIM AS HE WOULD BE BOUND, STRETCH HIM AS HE STRETCHES

every hare that in despair becomes insanely brave
and stops and turns to bite the fox --
every time a poet, at the brink, fills her overcoat
with rocks and walks into a quiet river --
you are dying every moment
groping in a bed of jasmine strewn with broken glass.
face pressed into the flowers hoping
with tightening chest to miss
the next cruel edge.
energy’s eternal
so the painful energy which you’ve denied
does not simply cease to be but
loosed -- unfelt -- it dangles
shimmering, festering
in the void a while
then scatters
thin and thinner endlessly
down diminishing
arrays of motes to the
very elements of matter.
somewhere passing down
it grows inconsequential
pain for nothing
a drop of misery for everything
as slowly anesthesia spreads
damping our wildest joy
numbing laughter
just behind slack lips.

I came to be because
that cloying blanket must not fall.
beneath the singing lash
hands and feet and side defiled
I cancel out the overbalance
made by your denials.
if dawn erupts and coyote brave
you nibble through
the leg that keeps you in the trap
I’ll be the one left
dangling in the void
a lens within a darkened room
waiting for your light
to make me
more than polished glass.

11/12/01

#1968

OF FEEDING AND THE REASON THERE ARE NOT MORE VAMPIRES

I am in a scientist’s laboratory standing very close to and facing a young woman wearing a long, white lab coat, her brown hair worn in a sleek, short coif cut just below her ears. I am standing so close to her I get only impressions of the room around us -- lots of metal countertops and clear glass objects which I take to be the usual accoutrements of a laboratory. I understand the brown haired woman is the daughter of a scientist who has re-animated a dead mother in order to nurture her infant son. The plan is to use a tube to re-attach the severed umbilicus so that the baby can be nourished from the mother’s placenta. I am in the room where the experiment is now taking place. My point of view is about a foot above the table top on which the infant lies, so I see him foreshortened, his head toward me. This immediate area is dimly illuminated with cold, blue-grey light, otherwise the room is dark. To my left is a low mound shape covered with a pale cloth which I take to be the corpse of the mother. The scientist’s daughter, who now has blonde hair worn in a late ‘40’s style, enters the room wheeling a gurney with a woman’s body on it toward the table. Her face expresses confusion, then shock and anger -- it would seem she did not realize what her father’s experiment would entail. I am surprised when she reaches over the mound to my left and pulls a length of clear, plastic tubing from beyond it. If the tube is coming from the mother she must be on the other side of the mound, in which case, the mound is -- what? -- and why is it between the baby and the mother? The blonde woman attaches the tube to the baby’s navel and I see thick, clotted looking, red-brown stuff moving through it. Suddenly I am aware that this is how vampires are created -- by being fed from their dead mothers. From behind a dusty, charcoal colored curtain made of stiff scraps of canvas big, black hands with thick, wrinkled knuckles and long, sharp claws reach out and try to grab the baby. I understand these things are trying to take the baby only because they cannot reach the mother on whom they would normally feed at such times. I also understand these ghouls are the reason there are so few vampires -- usually they would devour the dead mother before the infant could be fed from her and thus turned into a vampire. I grab the baby and pull him beyond the ghouls’ reach. Suddenly my wife, Joan, is standing in front of me. She holds a white sign with the numbers “1:53” in red on it just below her breasts. I awake with a start.

Sat up and immediately checked the bedside clock, wondering why I had to get up at 1:53. It was 6:30 in the morning.

05/26/03

#2257

THE REMOVAL AND PERIL OF THE FOLDING FLOWER/CREATURE

I am standing within an enclosure inside a large room in what I know to be a very large building. The walls of the enclosure are about four feet tall. It and the room are painted the same dark teal green. With me in this enclosure are a tall, wirily built man and a bizarre creature. The man is walking the creature, causing it to fold up on itself, otherwise it would be twenty or thirty yards long. As is, it is folded in lengths of about six feet each with multiple legs on each of these segments. The legs are bovine-like with hoofs, the body is about four feet deep but only a hand-span or so wide and out of its back grows a profusion of spines at the top of each of which is a red-orange-brown, glassy looking trumpet-shaped blossom. I am aware that the enclosure is normally filled with water, for the creature is too heavy to support its own weight on dry land. The man must move the creature, which is very rare, before others find out about it. Almost frantically he demands I help him. I can’t think what I can do, however, to help fold it. I wonder if he has another place to which he can take the beast. I am in a brightly lit place where I see two handsome, muscular, young men, both with prominent chins and thick hair standing up stiffly from their crowns. They look very similar, almost like twins, except that one is blond while the other has brown hair. The dark haired one wears a red and white checked, short-sleeved shirt -- the blonde wears a similarly styled, plain, light blue shirt. I see them facing each other, standing in profile to me as they discuss bringing the flower/creature to this place. As they are talking I realize one of them intends to shoot the creature with arrows once it is here and I begin to feel very anxious, not knowing which of the two has this intention.

11/07/03

#2348

THE DARK, GREEN BOY TAKER: You Can’t Save Them All

I am an adolescent boy lying on a narrow bed on a porch which I know has been converted into a room by having the exterior openings boarded up with rough, unpainted, vertically oriented planks. I also know there are a lot of other boys living in this house, but on this dismal porch/bedroom I feel lonely and isolated . Suddenly a large section of boards explodes inward and a pair of arms, so dark green as to be almost black, reach in, clearly intending to snatch me. I am my accustomed dreaming self (the identity in dreams which I tend to take for granted). I am walking along a crooked corridor in what I know to be a basement. The walls are made of stone and brick, roughly cobbled together with great lumps of mortar. Along both sides of this corridor are door-shaped openings through which I can see into small, bare rooms with low ceilings. In each room a young boy is sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. I get the sense they are deliberately not looking at the doorways, but I do not feel I am being snubbed or ignored. Rather it seems to me the boys, by not looking toward the openings, are trying to avoid or not to acknowledge something -- a conditioned denial that has nothing to do with me. I follow the corridor trying to get a feel for the shape of this place. The corridor snakes and twists back on itself, maze-like, implying a space too vast to be an ordinary basement. I pass room after room, and see a boy in almost every one. Then, in my mind’s eye, I see a man. He is thirty-ish, rugged looking with very close cropped, light brown hair. I wonder if he has imprisoned these boys. Then, still in my mind’s eye, I see another figure. Like the arms that reached into the bedroom/porch, this figure is an extremely dark, bilious green.. It’s hair is even darker than its body and stands up in curving spikes, like stylized flames, above its head. I have the distinct impression of wings though I do not actually see them. I see a close up of the head. Something about it, its texture and shape, reminds me of a burnt match head. Otherwise featureless, it has a mouth where one would expect a mouth, then two more where it should have eyes. All three mouths are open wide as though screaming with rage. I understand this is what the middle-aged man really looks like. I am the boy again, sitting in a basement room, slumped against the stone wall. I am remembering the Boy Taker, the dark thing that abducted me, seeing it hovering outside the hole in the boards. I see it and the middle-aged man alternating in rapid dizzying sequence. The memory of the Boy Taker’s three mouths is terrifying and nauseating. I am my accustomed dreaming self in the corridor looking into the little room at the boy. In my mind’s eye I see the Boy Taker and know it is somewhere nearby. Though I am essentially lost in this grim, tangled, seemingly endless basement I desperately try to think of a way to get the boys out. I feel panicky, worried I will not be able to find all the boys, never mind rescue them all.