These two dreams occurred the morning of April 13, and April 14. Short in duration and description, I really didn’t think them worthy of being written up here. Going through my notes, however, has nudged me into documenting them in a more formal manner.
“It’s the little things, that get you.” It’s the little things, that hide the greatest of clues, I’ve noted.
April 13:
Like a scene in a movie, suddenly, here I was, where I have always been, and will likely remain. Just like Mr. Nolan intended. I don’t know where I was. Could have been inside, could have been in a field. Could have been on a rooftop garden, could have been deep underground. Where ever I was, I was there, and I was pacing. Back and forth. Nervous hand wringing and tender lip biting to accompany the unusual display of dis ease.
Completely unnerved and discomfited. Near to the point of collapsing into a muddled quivering of tears. My muttering had long ago ceased to be coherent. It had devolved into barely audible moans of unutterable dismay. More pacing. More hand wringing. More nervousness.
And he watched me as one watches the pendulum. Back and forth. The Lord of my Kaaba, the genteel man with the colorful embroidered waistcoat, the master of patience watched as I continued my feverish pacing. He stood still at the center of movement, at the focus my quickened pacing revolved around. His arms behind his back, only his head and eyes tracking my mourned traveling to nowhere.
Never did I look up at his face, never did I try. (I can’t see his face, ever.) But I knew he was smiling at me. He was smiling in the same way a parent smiles at the child. The child knows only a child’s knowledge, but the parent knows the greater horizon.
As I passed by him for the uncountable time, he suddenly reached out with a movement both swift and smooth. As fluid as a snake strike, he brought his hand from behind his back and barely touched me on my forehead. With the softest of touches, he brought me to a full stop directly in front of him. I no longer paced, but my muttering finished devolving into whimpering, and my hands rubbed the skin into blisters.
He stepped forward and around me, circling from my right, to my left, to behind me. Switching hands as he did so, but never lifting his touch from my forehead. He make comforting and soothing sounds, but I wasn’t having any of it. I felt a buildup of nervousness, feeling a compulsion to move, to somehow shed the misery that was aching in my bones like a horrid fever. But his gentle touch prevented my legs from obeying my instinct.
Now behind me, his left hand smoothed out my brow and laid across it fully. His right arm wrapped around me in a half embrace and smoothed out my hands. Somehow, he managed to grip both my hands in one of his, restraining the hand wringing and healing the self-inflicted blisters in the same gentle touch. Now fully restrained by the one armed hold, he released his touch on my forehead.
I still whimpered in near tearful misery. My head released, I kept trying to look up at him, in the way a fearful child would seek the harbor of a parent’s loving gaze. But he kept his head out of my view, and his grip on my body prevented me from turning to face him. He allowed me the indulgence of attempting to try, then with a patient chuckle, he began stroking my afro with his left hand.
I felt the embrace of something else wrap around me. My body numbed and I struggled to remain standing upright. His comforting and soothing sounds, I think there were words, they assisted numbing me from within, so that I no longer felt the feverish compulsion to move. I stopped struggling against his embrace and allowed myself to relax fully into his spell.
He continued stroking my afro, guiding my head against his chest with each touch. I no longer felt my body, and lost all muscle control. I whimpered slightly as I fell against him, but he caught me with ease. I closed my eyes and attempted to tell him I was scared, but my mouth didn’t work properly. My jaw was somehow dislocated. My eyes snapped open and I tried to stand but I found I had lost all sense of my body from the pelvis down. I jerked forward only to wrap around his right arm twice in a tight grip. Then I realized what had happened.
My body was now that of a snake. I yawned, popping my jaw back into place. Licking the air nervously, I was now more scared than ever. I didn’t understand why the embroidered man had done this. I didn’t know why I was nervous in the first place. I wrapped the latter half of my twelve foot body around his torso and right leg while I raised myself up and spread my hood in warning. I hissed at him in warning while he chuckled again at me.
My sight was greatly limited by the change, but somehow I knew the color of my scales was the same as my human skin. He had changed me into a chocolate colored cobra with mocha markings. I struggled to remember what being a human is like, and tried to force myself back into my original form. I tried to untangle myself from his arm, to slither away, but he reached up with his right hand and grabbed the portion of me that stood upright from his right arm.
Out of instinct, I attempted to strike at his right hand that gripped me. Somehow, he was faster than I was and grabbed my head with his left hand before I moved more than a few inches. Still chuckling, he massaged my cobra head with the thumb of his hand as he kept a firm grip on me. The sensation was like pouring warmth over my head, warmth pouring down my sinuous body, warmth that relaxed and soothed the nervousness that had been carried over by the morphing of my flesh.
I wanted to resist him. I wanted to strike at him. I wanted to get away from the bipedal creature that held me with such a firm, yet gentle grip. But the pressure from his thumb was relentless. The warmth was too relaxing and smothering. I felt something else smoothing over me again. My coils around his arm, torso, and leg relaxed and slowly melted off of him. I did not notice when he no longer gripped my head, only that he had shifted from massaging with his thumb, to stroking my large snake head with his entire left hand.
Wait, I was a cobra, wasn’t I? I was. But no longer. I did not know when he had knelt down. I did not know when my body had lengthened even more, when I had increased in girth even more, when I had changed in color. I did not know why I had been nervous before. I sensed no danger. I sensed no alarm. This scaleless thing with long appendages was not a threat. It continued to make sounds, that I felt more than I heard. I knew my scales were the colors of sand and egg shell. I knew I was chilled, and the scaleless creature with long appendages was warm.
“There, that’s much better, don’t you think?” I heard the sounds it made, but they did not register with me. It stood up, picking me up from the ground as it did. It wrapped me about itself, without fear. “How about you and I go for a walk, hmm? I will keep you warm.” It began moving forward, in a gentle rhythm. As it moved forward, I felt it making more sound, again, I felt it more than I heard it. The sounds calmed me and reassured me, and I fell asleep.
My last knowledge before the depths of sleep overwhelmed me, was an external sight of the embroidered man, striding forward into the mists of the unknowable, with a fifteen foot long albino python wrapped around his shoulders and torso. He continued to stroke the python’s head, as he hummed a rhythmless song into the never.
~~~
April 14:
I’m restless again. Trying to walk it off with a quick paced stride, but the restlessness is too deep. The prickly discomfort too far ingrained. I am compelled to move forward, ever forward, to somehow dissipate this buildup of energy in my bones. I feel like I’ve been plugged into an electric current and it was threatening to shatter my nerves if I didn’t keep moving.
I didn’t look at the scenery. I didn’t stop to consider where I was. I didn’t try to sort out what path I was on. The only imperative was to keep moving. Keep walking. I passed a figure on my left. I knew he watched me as I passed, but I was too focused to even nod a greeting in his general direction. I only caught a bright swath of metallic color on his torso, and then he was behind me.
A few steps more, or was it a few hundred steps more, and he appears again. This time, on my right. I hear him chuckle as I passed him. Unable to stop, too energized to even slow down, only the bright vivid colors of his waistcoat registered with me as I passed him. And then, he was behind me.
A few steps more, or was it a few thousand steps more, and he appears yet again! On my left, the dark dressed man with the colorful waistcoat is waiting for me to approach him. The electric current setting my bones on fire from within again. I want to talk to him, I want to be polite and say my Hello’s and Goodbye’s, but the restlessness in my bones is having none of it. Tearful, I try to see more of him as I am passing, but only the colors remain in my sight.
So I did not see when he reached out with sudden swiftness and touched me on my forehead with his left hand. It was the barest of touches, the lightest of connections. The result was as if I had walked into a brick wall. I recoil from his touch and fall backwards onto a chaise that was not there before. As the body length lounge caught me softly, I realized I was dreaming.
The lucidity split my awareness between the worlds. Part of me was full in the dream, immobilized by the embroidered man’s gentle touch, held captive on the sand colored cushions. The other part of me was under a blanket in my bed in my home. My head arched strangely on the pillow. I can hear the street sounds leaking into my room from the barely opened window, hear my dog barking his anger at the cat perched on the fence just out of his reach.
Distressingly, I feel the tension in my sleeping body reaching dangerous levels. The arching in my neck spreads to my back and limbs. I know the position far too well. I’m about to have a physical fit. If only I could wake up, I may have a chance at stopping it before the tension reaches the breaking point.
But I’m not fully awake. The chaise in my dreams is just as real and solid as the bed in my room. My dream body on the chaise still feels a building of energy, but the muscles are relaxed in direct opposition to the aching tension of my physical body. Just before the tension breaks, the embroidered man holds his left hand before my face. I can feel him manipulating the energy around and in my dream body. On the chaise, my dream body begins the posturing that precedes a hard fit. The straining of my joints, the grimacing of my face. In the physical world, my physical body collapses against the bed, fully relaxed. My head tilted downward, I even start to snore softly.
He continues the building of tension in my dream body until I feel like my dream body is going to snap itself into pieces. He shifts his left hand, ever so subtly, and once again my two bodies switch tension levels. In the dream, I collapse against the enveloping chaise, gasping for breath. In the physical world, my body once again begins the pre-fit posturing. I can feel my teeth grinding against each other, the tip of my tongue caught fast, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth from the self-inflicted injury. In the distance, I hear my neighbor as he backs out of his driveway. It’s three in the morning. And I’m having fits in my sleep again.
But once again, just before my body reaches the snapping point, where fits evolve into seizures, he changes his effect on me. My physical body relaxes, and my dream body tenses instead. Back and forth he does this to me, until I have lost count. Each cycle takes less time to complete than the cycle before, until he has me both tense AND relaxed in both worlds at the same time. The electric current that had me so restless at the start of the dream is now fueling the strange state the embroidered man has brought me into. I am fully awake, and I am fully dreaming, at the same time. My eyes are open in both worlds, and I am looking at the popcorn ceiling of my room, and the grey mists that surround us. I feel the warmth of the blankets and the chill of the otherworld. I am alone in my room, and he sits beside the chaise.
I am at balance between the two states, the two worlds, the two awarenesses. I can feel the universe opening up to me. Can feel the connection to all things. I am alive. I am dead. I am in motion everywhere. I am at rest everywhere. I am. I am not.
“Good. You’re there. Now then…” These are the only words I remember him speaking.
…
The alarm clock shatters the balance, throwing me into a full fit that causes my back to arch so violently I sprain a muscle in my shoulder that aches for days and days. My throat is sore from the guttural vocalizations that accompany my fits and I break a vein in my right eye, making the eye bloodshot for the day. My tongue bled randomly from the hole I punched in it for a week.
~~~
I wrote these two dreams in my notes, considering them to be nothing more than the evidence of a stressed mind. Of which, they probably are. But, I’ve noted of late, the very things I thought were of no consequence have had a deeply felt effect on my path. So, here they are.
Make of it, what you may.