This Means War

I dreamt that we went to a remote part of Thailand to give a concert. That was a large audience in the kind of semi-outdoor, militaristic kind of hall. Really it was a concrete pavilion with a hard floor, some cream colored square columns, and a concrete roof. Next to it was a huge lawn, and beyond that some barracks. It resembles like a training camp or a military school. The concert either hadn't started or was only just underway when we received word that we were all going to have to be evacuated. We were all waiting to receive semi automatic rifles because the road was not going to be safe and we might have to shoot people on the way back.

We were waiting impatiently. Then a huge truck load of soldiers in camouflage drove up a narrow path. We were not to receive weapons after all. They were go to escort us. I found myself in a chauffeur driven car. It was a tight squeeze. I was in the backseat by the left-hand door. We were trying to get my niece Vanina to come into the car but she was panicking. She tried the door on my side but said she could not squeeze in. Then she tried getting in the back it must've been some kind of station wagon or hatchback. But she just couldn't get in and she was running around the car.

I was telling her not to worry because we would get to the highway soon and the military escort would prevent us from being killed.

As she was running I noticed a white Malibu directly in front of us. It was just parked in the driveway next to the pavilion. I will car did not stop but barrelled right into the back and rear ended it. The Malibu was pushed against the fence and its front fender was being crushed.  (The fence posts are flat plywood, pale colored with triangular tops.)

I began screaming, "Where is Sun? We have to wait for Sun!" It seems that my concertmaster was stuck in the barracks on the other side of the lawn. I was worried we could not evacuate him in time. The Malibu was slowly being crushed because my vehicle would not stop. It seemed that the driver had left the car to help my niece try to get in. Behind us was the huge military convoy. As the white car was slowly collapsing, I woke up.

The Four Beasts

I dreamed that I entered a white tiled bathroom. A pile of wet faeces was oozing from the toilet bowl and it gradually resolved into creatures. The first to crawl out of the slime was a giant lobster-scorpion. It was alive. It began to slither out into the house. I called my sister Kiki to look at it.

The next creature was a magnificent peacock. It looked at me, or right past me, and it too walked out into the house.

Then came a pheasant. It was white but it had a long tail that was also a serrated razor and it was lashing back and forth and wounding the last creature which was a small white wolf. The white wolf (no more than a puppy) howled in pain. As I watched, there might have been a fifth beast, a little cockroach, but I did not know if it was dead or alive.

None of the animals seemed to show any emotion.  They seemed to look through me, as if I wasn't there,  Only the white wolf seemed to have feelings of any kind.

The bathroom door led to a narrow hallway through which the main house could be accessed. The doorway was on my right and it was west I think. It was made of dark wood. The Floor was all white tiles. The bathroom was therefore connected to the main house by this corridor.

And that was when I woke up.

Four Pieces of Pork

I dreamed that my name is Ton and I am a very influential person like a teacher or a government official. A father comes to me and asks for help in manipulating his son's grades or influencing a school to accept him. I agree to make the phone call.

We go downstairs to an office with a door which is a mosquito mesh in a wooden frame (such doors were commonplace in houses before air conditioning in Thailand) and it's a sort of a messy office with a desk, some clutter, and an old woman in a dirty earthy-green dress standing watch. Actually it's not so much a dress as a blend of a khaki uniform and a phanung (a cloth wrap worn in former times) I pick up the phone (an old black dial phone) and speak very charmingly about a different subject to someone.

Then I think about who to call to help out the father who has come to me. As I am about to phone again, the old woman who has been very dour suddenly smiles and brings me a plate on which there are four pieces of pork, cut into round flat bite-sized pieces and arranged on a small plate. "You were so charming on the phone," she says. "Have this pork."

But when I pick up the phone she moves the plate so that it is just out of reach. I tell the man he should have some too. I start to dial. I wake up.

Looking at the clothes and technology of the dream it appears to be set in the 1950s or early 1960s ... during my childhood.

The Boy Vampire’s Passion

I had a dark and grisly dream last night. I dreamt I was a boy vampire who is a double agent for the forces of light and dark. I've been sent to stay in a suburban house, a white wooden house which is a typical American dwelling, with a lawn and a sidewalk. At night I send messages to both my masters, the Vatican and Lucifer, by burning candles and papers with signs up on them in my bedroom, Which is an upstairs corner bedroom in the house. The owners of the house, from whom I rent, seem very normal and oblivious to what I do. I suspect that their teenage son is a vampire like me, but I never speak to him.

My last night I plan to send an important warning to the powers of darkness but my candle message is intercepted by the Vatican. I know this because somehow it is the wrong candle. It is time for me to return.

As I leave the house, I decided perhaps now is the time to get to know the family I have been staying with. They are out on the lawn, so typical and so suburban. But as I watch, the father is playing with his infant son, and another son is watching.

The father takes a little dagger and cuts a little wound in the infant side. He says, “This is just practice for the real thing.” Not viciously, but with a strange kind of love, he bends down and begins to drink the infants blood, his tongue entering the wound.

Terrified yet fascinated I watch them thinking to myself, “this family is nothing like it seemed.”

I walk away from this scene which from a distance appears one of domestic tranquility, yet is actually profoundly dark. I do not know which side I am working for anymore, but I know that I have been living in a nest of evil disguised as a typical American suburban dream house.

I rarely have a dream so closely drawn from the Judeo Christian mythos. The father and the son with a wound in his side and the blood, and my own bizarre function in all of this, is a mystery. When I woke up, I did not wake up in terror. I was quite calm. Yet I know I should've been terrified.

My Premiere

Woman in red becomes woman in orange last night, but Ariadne continues to appear...

I dreamt that I was having a première in a major opera house. The after party was in the lobby because people was so exhilarated that they just wanted to celebrate right there. An opera singer who was in the audience, quite corpulent in an orange gown, was seated on the red carpet. Beside her on the right-hand side, there was a silver champagne bucket on a stand. A music critic, a skinny man in a tuxedo was earnestly discussing the music. He had a small moustache. He resembled the science fiction editor J.J. Pierce.

"I wish I had a score," he said.

"Take mine!" I said I handed him a huge pile of bound manuscript, printed on the recto pages and with a mass of scribblings on the verso.

"But if only I had a libretto," said the critic. I said, "it's all there it's all there. It's in the scribblings." The scribblings what a cloud of words written in every direction, like a verbal galaxy. I pointed to one word after another and they resolved into a libretto.

In the opening scene, there was something mythological going on. A queen or goddess was languishing. She was in the story also dressed in orange, In flowing ancient robes. She sang of terrible grief. At first I thought she was Ariadne, but there was also something of Penelope in her. Because, she was waiting for someone, a king. The way the words were arranged on the page brought to mind an old edition I used to have as a child of the Gilbert Murray translation of MEDEA (that begins something like "O, that the Argo had not wended its way" or something). But those were not the characters.
As the critic examined the score, The music began to sound right there in the lobby. The fact opera singer began to sing along with it. She sounded like Jessye Norman. But, she was Caucasian with long blonde hair. It was a huge, Straussian score.

We were all awestruck that this person who was only in the audience remembered the music after one hearing. After her arietta, there were a few lines from a handmaiden bringing her news. The woods began either "oh queen" or "oh Diana." (I remember think wait a minute it's not Diana, suggesting that maybe she is Ariadne.) From a sweeping marble staircase above, the words of the handmaiden were being sung by Kaleigh Rae Gamaché who was swooping down in a black evening dress. She wore pearls. She had a huge bottle of wine. She was practically floating down the steps.

As she sang she altered the words to "my lady, the king commands you to accept this bottle of wine from the cast party upstairs." She poured wine for the opera singer.

We were all exhilarated, laughing and full of joy. It was a heady dream, as if portending some great artistic success.

Bona Myrt

Last night I dreamed about music and creativity:

In my dream, I have resurrected an ancient choral piece and I am conducting a rehearsal of it a library, a renaissance building, it's cathedral like but not a church. The piece is in A major, but at the end there is a magnificat for which there exist two alternative versions, one in Eb and one in A. The piece also weaves back and forth between the two keys by utilizing each of the two tonics as a pivot note into the Lydian mode of the other tonic. (This is more of a Wagnerian or even Mahlerian device, so it is very uncharacteristic of this period.) I am trying to decide which version to use. The Eb is much more complex and the A major finishes the work (a Vespers) in a more obvious way. I am going over the words with the chorus and the phrase BONA MYRT recurs again and again. In the dream, I am explaining that they mean "good pain" or "sweet pain." The words BONA MYRT are being sung as I wake up.

importantly, Eb and A are a tritone apart, making them the most remote possible keys from each other. They are therefore polar opposites. A piece traditionally finishes in the same tonality that it starts with, so ending an A major piece with an extended movement in Eb would be unusual, even daring (for an ancient piece that I presumably "resurrected"). The woman in red WAS in this dream, but I forget where exactly — I believe the chorus was in red and were all or mostly women. On waking, I realize that "myrt" also relates to death, but only "pain" appeared in the dream (viz, It. "martire", Eng, "smart" rather than Skr, Cz. "mrt" Lat. "mort-") The spelling of MYRT moves it towards the name MIRA that appeared in a previous dream.

More things I remembered: it's definitely a women's choir and they are wearing red over white surplices. The location is the vatican library, though I've never been there. The entire composition is about the Virgin Mary.

Bastet

In the interest of honesty, I'm posting the following dream. It has stayed with me for hours, and therefore must mean something.

I'm sitting in a room with a gray cat. Others are there with their pets. Everyone is boasting about how well they are feeding their pets. I take my cat in one hand and begin to feed him. It is very pleasant. But suddenly, The cat defecates onto my hand. And doesn't stop. I am incensed. I say, "I'm going to take you back to your room." But the cat doesn't stop. I start to carry the cat away. It doesn't stop. The feces are moist and odoriferous. I lose my temper. I slap the cat. He doesn't stop. Finally I take a pencil and begin to lash him. But he doesn't stop. He does this all the way back to his room, but in the seconds before I wake up, he transforms into a yellow baby chicken.

I don't think I've ever had a dream about both shit and violence before. Certainly never one where I am ever cruel to an animal. When I woke I thought it must be something trivial. Usually such dreams are easily forgotten. But this one remains in my mind. 

I wasn't going to post it, but I have been doing so for the last seven years so here it is.

Water, Water....

It is 5 AM. I wake up from a dream where I am a young boy who has emerged from a high-rise after midnight. The street is flooding. Men in yellow hardhats are chatting, laughing. Water is coming coming coming from the left hand side. It is beautiful and exhilarating in the night. The street is like a river. It has white waves and dark water.

I begin running, chased by the water. I cross a metal bridge. It's a bridge with trapezoid iron grid work, like a railway bridge. I constantly take selfie's. I catch the water in snapshots of its motion. On the other side of the bridge, The colors are more blue and cool and the street is more medieval looking. It's a narrow high Street like an old English Village with cobblestones. I keep running and snapping pictures. The water is rushing behind me. Finally I manage to catch a snapshot where the water is a huge Wall frozen, much taller than me. It is so beautiful and such an elusive shot to have taken.

Very happy with myself, I turn right and the street it's more dry. There is a house with an iron covered walkway and a black gate. From a basement apartment, an old woman comes up some steps. She is followed by an elderly Asian couple. She says to me, where are your parents? Why are you out so late? You should not be out so late, a nice Asian boy like you.

Then I wake up.
Now it is 5:18 A.m. I am barely awake now, and I think I must go back to sleep. I just had to write down this dream before it went away.

Lumberjacks

Bits and pieces of a big dream about a jailbreak come to me. Also another dream set with carnival floats and bearded men in lumberjack shirts simulating fellatio with beer bottles. Weird, weird. Just fragments now. I was not meant to remember these, not like the others.

Hair

Last night's dream is about hair. Like Samson, my hair seems suddenly shorn. I find myself lying on the ground supine, and my hair, once long, is in three sections beside me, each divided by a little line of stones. The first section is my real hair cut short. The next segment seems to be white gravel. Finally there is a third segment of hair which is growing underneath a clear plastic covering. Although my hair is part of me it is also the earth beside me.