Church Reading / The Plasma Gun / I Fucked Up

     

Me and Alexis late 80’s on a night walk

    Yesterday I went through my Twitter (X) posts going back to January, looking for evidence to support my theory that I had been losing the ability of dream recall. What I discovered was that there was a pattern:   I’m dreaming at least half the month and mentioned dreams eighty-four times over the past six months. This left me 100 days of rest. There is nothing wrong with my dream recall, just my passion for writing them down had been slowed by my recent health concerns. I then ran a scenario where if I had been dreaming at this same rate for the past five years and creating blog posts that averaged at least 2K words - I would be at 1,680,000 words - that caught me by surprise, and quite frankly scared me. Scary in the sense that it has always been in the back of my mind that delving into my own psyche daily and reconstructing each scenario to the best of my ability would drive me into madness. 

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    The first dream woke me up and I almost lost the thread, this had been happening lately but if I had caught each of the dreams I couldn’t remember - I would probably have had only eighty-five days of rest (See paragraph above).

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    In the dream, I was riding in a car with my wife at night in the winter-time. We arrive at a parking lot, the snow had been cleared off to the sides so that cars could park. Before even arriving, I was protesting the fact that it had snowed and there shouldn’t even be a service going on - my wife ever the trooper kept driving without a word. The world we were in was darker than normal, maybe rural or a different time-frame where street lights weren’t spaced as closely as in a modern city. Our destination turns out to be a church, my wife and I join the ‘mass’ of people entering the building. The significance of the snow outside determined what I was wearing, a thick woolen overcoat over my suit and a hat (I don’t wear Fedoras) we were milling about waiting our turn to put or garments into the coat room. A parishioner who was part of this evenings mass came up to my wife and I, handing me the reading I had committed to making. Puzzled, I looked to my wife and she reminded me that I was asked to do so. Really I didn’t remember. So my wife decided to join the rest of the congregation in the main part of the church while I shuffled up to the chancel to have a seat. I could at least practice the reading so that nerves wouldn’t mess up my pacing. Looking down at the prepared section of notes, I found my part outlined but had difficulty understanding the words. A bible passage was floating through my mind at this point and I was trying to will them to become clearer for me on the page. Like many times in dreams concentrating on the page and words only draws me out of the current dream and deposits me into another.

    I’m in the new dream. Confusion because I’m not in the church anymore, but in a room where my son is helping a professor or scientist with a machine they are both constructing. The man my son is helping is from India and he is excited to be nearing the completion of this contraption. They are both adding parts in sequence, tightening nuts with precision until at last the professor barks out to me “Bring me some ice!” I comply, running into the kitchen area and find a clear plastic Dart cup - the 20oz size on a counter and rinse it in the sink. Opening the freezer door the ice-catch is full and I scoop out a generous amount of round bottom cubes. Racing back to the living-room with the ice, the professor motions me to place the ice in the chamber he just exposed by lifting the lid. The ice falls in and there is no reaction - I become mesmerized by the tendrils of cold air that was coming off the ice in the container. The professor closed the lid and pushed me back just in time…

WHAM!!

The sound was like the crack of electricity from a lightning bolt, superheating the air. I was dazed by the power of the machine. The professor was upset, a slight miscalculation and a loose bolt at the base of the machine caused it to tilt upward, firing the beam through the ceiling. We all looked through the hold that had traveled upward past each level near the light fixture on every floor all the way through the roof. On the other side of the room was another part of the machinery that was supposed to catch the energy - the idea was to use this bolt of plasma to start a fusion reaction within a temporal dampening field. Like many scientists before him he had failed, but with a few adjustments he might be able to replicate the experiment. I looked up through the hole again, amazed that the other residents on the floors above weren’t vaporized by the blast. My attention is drawn up through the new opening… I’m being pulled…upward.

I wake up. The dream is fading so I lay still trying to remember… I caught the thread.

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    The next dream was a bit more confusing even though the identity of my “companion” was revealed this time. Most times there is a shadowy entity off to the periphery, sometimes just to accompany me while I am walking, other times morphing into a person I know or have seen in various media. Alexis was with me, his passing in 2008 greatly affected me - I cried just as much for him as I did for my mother years earlier. Another piece of my heart had broken off with his loss. Yet the hurt I felt wasn’t as much as the arrow he shot through my heart with the breaking off of our friendship - he vowed to never speak to me again, his death only sealed that vow forever. Like we did many times in real life, we were just walking around a random neighborhood at night, without a care in the world. An all night bodega on the corner just ahead signified we were in familiar territory within the confines of NYC. A flat-bed was parked on the sidewalk with a load of cut logs - there wasn’t any conversation going on between Al and I - maybe he was mirroring the feeling of missing these walks as much as I did. 

    A woman who was standing near the load of lumber with a group of men sees us walking up and charges down the slope of the street and chest bumps me to the floor, I fall and scrape my hand - mumbling a few curses trying to pick myself back up off the concrete. Alexis then does something peculiar. Ripping a piece of bark from the logs, he gently wraps it around my left hand like a bandage, taking the gentle care and affection of a nurse. The woman stands in defiance as if she was trying to interrupt the bond I have with Alexis - I didn’t know if she was “Tricky” or M.A.R.T.H.A. 

    Mad about her intention to get my attention, I raised my bark covered fist and gave her the middle finger. This upset my archetype. Maybe it was this kind of behavior from me making admission into the dream world become temporarily revoked? Crossing the street into the park where the trees had been cut down she walked into a stump almost 6ft tall and merged with it, disappearing. I said out loud to Alexis, who still hadn’t spoken a word to me since that fateful break-up years ago… “I FUCKED UP” he replied casually without any feeling “You fucked up.”

    I had to make amends. I crossed the street and was tiptoed with my face into the hollow of the tree speaking into it to the effect of “I’m sorry to have offended you, but you caught me off guard trying to get my attention. You succeeded, let me know how I can make things right” no response from the hollow of the tree as if I expected the deep voice of an ENT to accept my peace offering. This was a lesson. My apologies were as empty as the hollow void of the tree.

    Frustrated I continued up the street with Alexis, knowing he was the King of sweet-talking women whenever they became upset to no resolution - I implored him in the manner of “Star Wars” “Master you must teach me the ways…” he replied using the voice of James Earl Jones “Obie-Wan has taught you well…” perplexing me because I haven’t had a teacher here… Or have I?

    The end of our walk was at hand, he prepared to go back, crossing over the plane into the video-game world; a place I imagine he would have taken up residence in (He was a relentless tactician seeking to master all video games he loved) Taking a step up on a rail-like structure - he jumped through the screen (veil) onto a passing space ship that was inside the game… I almost wanted to follow him. The battle was raging with laser cannons from all of the ships involved - he piloted the craft away deeper into the game matrix. I knew he would win. 

He always does.

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    I woke up a few minutes after six, Radiation treatment was pushed back in schedule till nine this morning making it easier to have a sit-down and write. It’s almost 12 noon and I’m finishing this up at work.