Dream 4 - Ritual

This week you dreamt of magic and those who perform it. Rituals to break the rules of the world. At times you were the magician, at others the one being wronged by magic.

You’re in the courtyard      of what looks like a mission      turned into a motel. It’s night.     The courtyard is dusty and strung with lights.      There is a large wooden gate behind you, the kind that could let through     a carriage, and the remnants of a large outdoor party laid out in front of you.     This feels like this could be the movie set for a cowboy movie, or a pirate movie,   where everyone stops in a seedy port-town to spend their loot, at the most inopportune time for the plot.

You feel like      you might have dreamed of this place before,      or at the very least something so similar in structure     that your brain works around its space in the same way.

Looking under the tables,       you find baskets of colorful laundry,       which you understand belong to the locals of this town.       Leaving them here under the tables is part of a traditional celebration     that has to do with something like renewal, or cleansing, or gratefulness.

You look up to see      a young woman with a curly bob      walking through the courtyard. Her hair seems like     it’s made of optical fiber. She wears a bodysuit that’s transparent plastic     or flesh-colored, or that just is her flesh, you can’t quite tell. Light acts      differently around her. She’s a visitor to this land, like you, and she likes you. You,    more than liking her, are completely smitten.

Then,    you and the woman are on the road,    stopped at a gas station. Both of you are in tux and top hat,      unreasonably elegant, leaving some kind of event. You stand in the scraping      green light of the gas station, standing a few paces away while your friend (you’re in love, but really,    you are friends above all) goes about her business with the gas station attendant. You get the feeling she’s calling upon some kind of      shared secret code with the gas station attendant, and you burn with curiosity to know what it is, to be included in this group, but you know       not to seem desperate or nosy. She hands him some kind of small precious item, and he goes to fetch something large from the back of the gas station.      When she brings it back to the car, you notice it’s a cardboard box holding a huge piece of blue and green patterned cloth.

As you drive,      she asks you to slightly change route.     This feels like it should be nothing,      like a simple suggestion, but really she has changed where you were going completely.     Other disparate cars filled with people she knows are gathering around you, driving fast, and she continues to give you these polite directions.     You’re heading out into open nothing, desert land, off the road.

When a true congregation of cars has gathered,      she climbs over the seat into the back and opens the trunk. From it,      she pushes the ton of cloth, which rises high into the air. The other cars do the same.       From this vertical flurry of fabric you can see a serpent start to form, as large and powerful as a tornado,       summoning dark clouds and wind around it. You turn to your friend to express concern at last, and she looks back at you with genuine empathy,     as if she has just now realized she has worried you and wishes she hadn’t. She so reassuring, that you are calmed, and feel certain what she’s doing is okay,     and that you love her, but still not enough that you are completely comfortable with what is happening.

You dream of a theater,     of which you are the manager.     The backstage is many stories high,      and the stage itself is small. The set is made entirely       out of off-white paper, and shaped like a brutalist city,  with narrow streets and criss-crossed staircases. Already,  some paintings of figures have been tested out on the floorboards    and at the base of the set. Symbolic images: snakes and red fruit and trees       with thin white trunks, all little semantic units to build up the spell of this play you’re mounting.

You and a number of stagehands        are placing a tight array of ritual items at the foot of all this.      Small masks, yarn totems, scissors. One of them, which you hold up before putting down in its place     center stage is an ornate neck piece made with golden wire and match heads.

As you all do this,     your bodyguard, a bull-headed man     looks on. He has the dress of an egyptian deity     and the demeanor of a club bouncer. You don’t trust him, but he does his job well.

When setup is done,      as a reward you take the stagehands     up into the fly gallery, where you’ve set up       a series of greenhouses. They connect with narrow metal catwalks, stack slightly on top of one another     and poke out from the ceiling to show the crescent moon laying on white trusses.

As you show them around the various plants you’ve collected here,     and allow the stagehands to scatter, one of them sticks by you, asking you questions     that at first you think to be innocent and curious, but come to understand are flirtation.     You’re flustered, unused to this kind of thing, guilty that you’ve impressed your own stagehands    to the point that one has developed a crush on you. You divert the flirtation, asking questions that ground you as being more      a concerned boss or parent than a mysterious character.

Screams from the other stagehands      break the interaction. A fire has started on the stage below.      The bull-headed man is to blame. You’d entrusted him with lighting whatever flames      were needed downstairs, but this-- this is sabotage. You run out off the catwalks and into a service staircase,     where you know you will meet him as he makes his way up. On your way through the bare walls of the service staircase,      you know you’ll pass by the emergency closet. You skid past it, catching yourself on the handle, quickly retrieve one of the laser pointers inside         before resuming your chase.

The minotaur appears at the end of the hallway,       clearly unhinged and dangerous. Confident, almost triumphantly,     you pull out the laser pointer and hit him on the chest in 4 specific places:    the heart, the right hip, the left armpit, the right shoulder. The shock to his system is instant,     and his stomps towards you weaken to a stumble. You approach him, ready to make some comment to reassert your power,      when you notice his face warping. His nose looks drawn onto the air, shifting between human and animal. This could only have been the work     of the paintings on the set. The bull-man had never wanted to do this, and now you’ve nearly killed him.

You’re in the studio of a woodcarver.    It’s a large, brutalist atrium that seems like it’s underground,   but is beautifully lit by a window on the ceiling. There are painted sculptures    in alcoves all around the cone ceiling, and a shallow pit separating the artist’s craftsman’s workspace    from the walkway around it. At the center of the four walls are giant negative relief carvings of his face, each of them taller than you.     Different things have been deposited in them as offerings: pink flowers, pillows and incense in one, fur and jewelry and brass instruments in the next,     dirty laundry in another, floppy disks and discarded tech in the last.

You’re starting the get the feeling      this carver is more like a magician, who has a privileged understanding of the world      which he is not willing to share, when suddenly he catches you, locking your wrist behind your back.

Leaning in close,       he chides you, truly amused at your audacity     in being here. Stilling pinning your arm behind your back,     he puts a golden necklace with a small hippo pendant around your neck.       He pulls it back so that it almost chokes you, then tucks it in your hair      such that you now know you cannot remove it. This is a curse, leverage that he now has against you.      All these movements he does with ease and precision, then sends you away.

Later,      you are at dinner with peers.      The setup of the dining hall is strange:    tall and long like a cathedral or a train station.    The rows of tables are continuous and stacked on one another      like scaffolding which you might call bunk-tables. You can see the legs of your fellow classmates      dangling above you. To move around, students walk along an aisle that cuts through the dishes and climb stairs     like wooden bleachers.

You get up to leave,     but the woodcarver’s voice rises    from the base of your neck, and you know that disobeying him       could spell out your death. He wants you to grab the attention of one of the students above you      by pulling at their sock. This, you understand, will start a chain of events that causes the entire giant table to collapse.       You, as his threatened servant, are not executing the plan, merely igniting it.

Fearing that your neck will burn,      you go up to the person in question,  but are distracted by someone you know vaguely,     who you haven’t seen in a long time, who calls your name enthusiastically.        She’s a blonde with bangs and a smile so big it bothers you, and a large felt clip in her hair      that looks like an eye with very long lashes. You try to pull away from the small talk in time,      but already the benches are starting to collapse from the wrong side, coming down like dominoes towards you.     Far away, below ground, you can already imagine the four head prepared by the woodcarver start to rumble and break,    his plans failing, and his anger towards you mounting. The sculptures in the ceiling start to fall, you understand,  much like your classmates from the collapsing tables.