Dream Voyages

"If you see the dead in your dreams, it portends good fortune. If they speak to you, prepare to die."

The above is not an exact quote from The Witches' Book of Fortune Telling and Dream Interpretation. It's close enough. You get the point. The dead visit me in my dreams. Sometimes, I can hear their sing-song voices taunting me. Sometimes, I wake a dead relative lying cold and stiff in their shroud, tucked away in eternal repose. But they are there. And, like in Dr. Caligari (1920), they are watching.

I'll take you along with me on a short journey, an obscure little trek through the outer reaches of land where things are not what they seem, where everything, every image focused upon, is pregnant with hidden meaning, with a secret, coded language that speaks to the internal eternal within. It is our reconnection with the vast Infinite, that we are all a part of, but that, divided among the many "Masks of God" that It wears, is reaching out to fill our finite minds, like the ocean filling a teacup, with vast, unrestrained and limitless reaches of Itself, It's limitless knowledge of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow still, and its storehouse of memory that is neverending and all-encompassing and the totality of All.

A young black man, working with me at a restaurant (wherein the food is cooked in pullout drawers full of boiling oil), breaks his glasses [1], and I hide them from him under a car seat. So he won't be angry.

What can all of this mean?

My late friend Jon spends the night riding with us, but doesn't get the job at the Speakeasy (an old bar we pull up at the side door to but which has perceptibly altered inside, been restored, in twenty years) he wants and must return with his father in the morning. His father, as I shake his hand, reminds me that he is "Doctor Titchenal." I apologize and tell him "I'm sorry. Not that you're a doctor, but that I forgot to address you as one."

What can this portend?

I go to an aunt's but it is not her. It is in a trailer court where she lives. She chews her food and opens her mouth, but she is young, thin attractive with long dark hair. She lays beside me and is then embarrassed because "The children are watching. You need to move me." She is then beside a table next to the bed, holding a baby with greasy feet. She tells me, "Hold her. You're so mean to her." But I protest that I am not. [2]

How does one read the hidden symbolism of the dream?

Earlier I had hugged Jon and told him how good it was to see him again, all these years that he has been dead.

...And, speaking of the dead, I was in the mortuary [3] or prep room, working, casket after casket, with stiff laid out, their heads twisted around, their long, dead, stiff, and bluing beak-like noses to a scent they could never again smell. And a voice booms as I try to sneak out, wondering, "Why do you need to give a dead man a blanket? Will he get cold?" No.

It's like a coded language, a secret code, that must be deciphered bit by bit, to form a complete sentence, a coherent whole.

Who is working with me? I never get to see the face. The walls seem carpeted with a shag-like furry growth sprouting out of the old place, and I press the elevator button in the little hotel room nook by a vase, with an old frame mirror that has looked out on better days.

The smell of decay is in the air, but it could just be rotting food.

Or,

His hand...

(Passing by a shop window with mother, I see a turquoise, spangled gown I know she could never wear. [4] I tell her I'll buy it for her anyway; I'd buy her anything. We go inside, and right away I make that they've turned it into a fabric store with carpeted walls and a rack in the back with piles of rotting newspapers declaring "Jimmy Carter Hailed as Peacemaker." Grandpa is there pushing a rattletrap old cart even though he is four years in his grave, but he says nothing intelligible to me except some words that sound like "Ama, ama, ama..." In the cart sits a baby with long orangeish-red hair and no face.)

Then back to the college, where we sit in an antechamber strumming two large old guitars, while they bring in an ancient doddering man with a long grey beard and long hair, stooped over a cane. The girl to the left of me strums her guitar, and someone is sitting across from me. The girl to my left leans over, and whispers, "He's getting ready to die. Just don't say anything."

And I look about me, and suddenly the room is filled with dogs. Little white snarling bitches, and I say, "I don't like dogs."

But then it all comes crashing down somehow, and I wake up, and realize, I'M NOT ALONE.

As Alan says at the beginning of Dr. Caligari, "There are spirits everywhere. They have effected my life!"

And he wasn't wrong about that.

Addendum: The night before last I was walking a hallway in Hell, which is just a place where suicides roam. Following an old soldier, who led me through a doorway into an egress wherein the doors to two elevators were boarded up. "People don't like to come back here, because they know they can never escape." We go back out into the hallway, and I turn and am at his back. I reach out to touch his flesh and find it has a cold, waxy texture. I ask him, "Are you dead?"

And he turns, and his lips curl back as if they are being pulled by wires, and his mouth takes on a simian cast as if I can see the skull beneath the skin. Now the gums and huge teeth are revealed, and a guttural rasp shoots out from between his jaws, which never move.

"YES. IAM."

But...he wasn't a ghost. No. Reanimated dead. A zombie. I believe the above quote refers to the ghostly dead. Not living corpses.

So I think I'm safe.

Notes.

1. To dream of broken glasses is self-explanatory. It is a lack of vision or foresight, weighing me down, causing me to see things without the proper perspective. I do not wish for anyone to know this, so I attempt to hide them under the car seat. The only confusing aspect of this is that in the dream they are technically not my glasses. What do you think this could refer to? The dream of cooking portends "unexpected guests, happiness, and warmth." According to one source, at least.

2. I m at a loss here. the baby would seem to indicate a new beginning, but it is covered in a sort of amniotic slime as if just born. A kind of grotesque grease. And so I don't wish to hold her, as I am "mean to her." Perhaps the rejection of new ideas, of rebirth.

3. According to one source, a dream of a mortuary can portend, "A shocking or dreadful news you are about to receive. Alternately, it can represent issues from the past you are ready to let go of."

4. A dream of a vacant store, a store window, and a dress, window-shopping with a relative, indicates an impoverishment of feeling, a clinging to the past, and an inability to move on. To see a dead relative there affirm this for me. Inward guilt because I can't move on from what has occurred in the past, that lingering sense that I could have done more, had I been a "peacemaker." But I also remember that the word "peace" on the front page of the paper was misspelled. It reads: "Carter Hailed as Piecemaker." I've also considered, since learning he has gone into hospice, that the word might have been "pacemaker."