I laze my sick time away watching daytime television. I did not know about Judge Alex and The Peoples' Court and Dr. Phil. How would I?
I found a fortune which I don't recall having received in a cookie. It lives above the keyboard of my computer. It says "Doors shall soon open for you." Maybe it is true: television is opening some hithertoo unknown doors to me.
Not much interesting happening, so a substantial portion of today's post is a non-fiction narrative written before thisCassandra existed. Title is Where Nothing Matters.
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Still. I am lying so still that I can feel my body tremble every time my heart pumps. With each intake of breath I feel rustling in the bottom of my lungs, like bits of metallic foil snow falling in an ornamental glass globe winter scene. The rustle starts small and grows larger with each inhalation, expanding to fill my lungs completely with the sensation of falling snowflakes.
When my lungs are full the rustling extends into the other parts of my body, first filling my chest and thorax, and then my arms and legs. My head is filled last. Sights of colors in patterns, sounds of voices and rushing wind join the feel of flakes brushing against each other. The sights, sounds and sensation grow until there is nothing outside of them: the sight is brighter than sight could, the sound louder than sound could, the sensation stronger than sensation could ever be.
I become one of the flakes and swirl on the wind, twisting, falling, rising. I swirl faster and faster, becoming tenser and tenser, harder and harder, until I am shot up, out of the vortex of sight, sound, and sensation, like a dart from a blow gun. When I reach zenith I lose mass and drift gently, like snow, through the still air. Now I can travel where my thoughts choose to take me. I am free to dream...
Everything around me is red, brown, or black, very dark. I am in a place where I have never been, standing in front of a store which I have never before seen. It is small and quaint, like the general store in a small town. I enter and stand just inside the door, looking around and smelling the air. I see shelves holding big jars full of sweets, barrels on the floor, a big gray cat, and some chairs in the corner. I smell dust, and starch, and cheese.
There is a woman behind the counter. She is young and blond. She asks if she can help me, and I smile and say No. She comes around to my side of the counter with a bolt of cloth. She holds the cloth against me, to show me what it looks like; it has a pattern of cats and vampires and demons performing orgiastic Bachanalian dances. The pattern on the fabric changes as I watch it, becoming bloodier and more brutal, until I decide that I should wake myself up, because I do not want to watch it any more.
Waking in the middle of a dream is often disorienting for me, because even though I get out of bed, get a drink of water and use the toilet, when I go back to sleep I find myself where I left my dream.
The big gray cat is winding itself around my legs. The woman kneels in front of me and stares at my crotch. She is not touching me. The cat is leaning on my legs and rubbing. The woman leans over and kisses my groin through my clothes; I can feel both her and the cat drawing life from me. She bites me and tries to push me to the ground, but I do not fall.
The woman looks up at me and smiles. She has ears like a cat and sharp, pointed teeth. The fabric which she has dropped to the floor, is moving, trying to tangle itself up with my feet. The cat is stretched up, ready to pounce. I force myself to wake up again.
I have never been much good at distinguishing reality from the other things which happen around it, particularly my dreams. I don’t know what my dreams are, but they have always been odd. Are they messages from me to shining me? Are they messages from something outside to me? Or are they trivial release of anxiety? There is no way to know for sure.
Separating waking from sleeping is not as simple for me as it should be. I am not always certain whether I am dreaming or not. By consensus waking life is a continuum punctuated by periods of sleep, a theory which cannot be proved but which is supported by the appearance of life carrying on much the same each day. But the converse, the idea that daily life is dreams and dream life is reality, can also be supported if...
When I go back to sleep I return to the store, where the woman, the fabric and the cat are waiting for me. I back away from the three of them. The woman tries to throw the fabric around me, and the cat tries to trip me, but they both miss; I have already started to run from them. The fabric has manoeuvred itself to interfere with my feet, so I cannot run as quickly as I would like to. An apparent century later I reach the door and run through. As I do, I blink. When I open my eyes again I am awake and breathless, lying in my bed.
For a minute or more I am unable to reach over and switch on my lamp. I want the light on because I have seen enough scary movies to know that scary things rarely happen in well‑lit rooms, but I do not want to stick my hand out from beneath the safe blanket to reach across the unsafe darkness to switch on safety. I do not want to lie frightened in the dark until the sun rises, so I force myself to move my arm across the abyss between my bed and the lamp. It is a long bit of uncharted darkness.
After the light is on, I go and make myself a cup of tea, which I drink while sitting in my bed. I think about the dream I just had and then wander into a dream from my past: I am in a crowded, old‑fashioned train station with my mother. She and I are going on a trip together. The colorful wooden train arrives, and the passengers crowd toward it to climb aboard. My mother and I are separated, and I cannot find her. The train pulls away, and my mother sticks her head out of one of the windows and calls to me. When I look up she throws a rope for me to catch so that she can pull me onto the train. I try to grab the rope, but it passes through my hands. I am left standing alone.
My tears over that dream, or a plane/boat/bus/car variation, woke me up almost every night when I was four years old. It is one of my earliest and most frustrating dream memories. I have another: One person on the planet Earth catches an intergalactic disease and turns into a six‑foot‑long shiny grub, the color of days‑old coffee and cream. That grub‑creature touches one person who then becomes a grub‑creature as well. Those two touch two others and so on, until I am the only non‑grub left. All of the grub‑creatures chase me, and I am surrounded. They come closer and closer; I can smell their insect smell and can hear the dry little noises they make as they scrape along the ground. I do not want to become one of them and there is no escape, so I wake up.
But wait. I don't want to think about my nightmares past or present. What I want is to calm myself, so I take the unassuming stone from my shelf. The stone which fits so well in the palm of my hand, which fits so well in my mind. The stone which I found in the great hailstorm in February of 1985...
The sky was gray and the atmosphere oppressive, as heavy and immobile as molten metal, and I debated whether or not to turn back. All around I could see nothing but birch trees naked for the winter. There was no shelter and my car was more than two miles away.
I believe in magic: I look for signs and portents, markers in my life. In Fraser Foreshores Park that afternoon I felt alone and vulnerable so I decided to walk back to the car. As I turned a gale came from the west and whipped me, my dog, and the trees on its way east. The trees cracking around me sounded ominous, like riflefire. My world had shrunk; it consisted only of me, my dog, the wind, the sounds, and the distance to the car.
Fraser Foreshores Park, in the southeast corner of Burnaby, is a long, narrow piece of land along the Fraser River. The trails lead between sand heaps, and through birch woods, swamps, and fern groves. It is a pretty place to walk, but uncomfortable for me since my dog had an anxiety attack there in December of 1984.
She and I had been walking beside a drainage ditch along a trail which we hadn't taken before, when she went rigid, pointed, and then whimpered. The hair on her back stood up. I have a cautious faith in the intuitions of animals ‑ I suspect that they might be far less disconnected from the universe than we humans are, because their wastes usually replenish the earth, and ours usually pollute ‑ so I turned away, even though I could see nothing but trees and grasses.
With her rear end tucked low she followed me, stopping once in a while to look back, point and whimper. Every time she looked back her ruff stood up again. I was relieved when we reached the main trail beside the river again.
After the dog's anxiety attack, the spirit of the park changed for me; it was not entirely benevolent anymore. I became careful, uneasy when I saw other people walking their dogs. That gray February day my fear made me turn back, and immediately the winds came. I had walked about ten yards when the hailstones started to fall, like popcorn, white and lively, relieving the atmosphere. It no longer felt ominous so I decided to take the long route back to the car. I crossed the log bridge and entered the swamp which is my favorite part of the park. I call this swamp The World Navel, and I go there to be myself. Great things, simple things happen there.
Across the bridge, the hailstones still fell - a quarter of an inch across - but I wasn't afraid: Goretex is good protection against wind and hail. While walking, I felt a sensation of the command Look Up, and I did. About five yards above my head, was an eagle, hovering. He stayed directly over me, flying in small circles as I walked, and I watched him. I did not look away. My feet knew their way.
Minutes, hours or days later, my face started to sting from the hail, so I looked down. The ground was covered, white with hailstones more than a half inch across. I looked back up at the eagle, but he was flying away.
The hail fell thick, so thick that all colors were of dusk: the sky was streaks of twilight and nothing more. Eyesight was impaired ‑ I couldn't see anything farther away than about twenty yards ‑ but hearing was not. When the dog heard the geese she chased them. The two geese honked, she barked, and the three of them disappeared into the storm. I called her and called her again, but she didn't come back. I was alone. My world had shrunk again, to the hail and the silence and me.
But I wasn't really alone. I knew the dog would come back after a while, so I kept walking. She found me near the edge of the swamp, close to the place where she found a duck wing which she gave to me. At the place where she found the wing, I always look down to see whether there are any more wings, but there never are. That afternoon I saw what I thought was a ping pong ball half‑buried in the sand. I dug it out of the ground with the toe of my boot and picked it up. It wasn't a ping pong ball. It was a white stone, nearly spherical. My world had expanded again.
Close up, the stone is not as much like a ping pong ball as it looked. It isn't quite regular and it has a sand‑sized pit on one side. But its surface is so nearly regular that I often wonder whether it is a stone. Sometimes I think it is an eagle's egg or a dragon's eye. I know it is a gift.
After I found the stone, I remembered being six years old, and a friend telling me that if I ever found a perfectly white stone, my wishes would come true. She was solemn and matter‑of‑fact in the way that overly‑serious children are. I haven't yet found a perfectly white stone, but I have found an almost perfect white stone, a little soiled and smudged, and a bit irregular. I'm not sure that wishes come true, but if they did I think they would be soiled, smudged and irregular versions of the ideal. Like my stone.
Holding my stone and thinking about it helps me to calm myself when I want comforting, and it works tonight as well as it ever does, helping me to forget the bogies out in the dream world enough so that I can go back to sleep.
I am walking on a road through a forest. I come to a river over which two bridges span. The two bridges form a fork in the road. I stand at the intersection of the bridges and consider my dilemma: over the bridge to the left I see green - forests and meadows - and over the bridge to the right I see light, golden light which has no source that I can see. I must choose between the forest and the light.
I choose the bridge which leads to the light and begin to walk across it. It is long, much longer than it looked from the road, and when I am halfway across I stop and rest. I stand leaning on the railing, with one foot resting on the concrete footing. I look out over the ocean which the river feeds into and far out I see a storm, a tornado and lightning, even though I see no clouds. The storm is coming toward the land.
I decide to return to the forest, but when I arrive it has changed into the downtown area of Anytown, North America. The buildings are quaint and mostly gray, mostly stone. I wander the streets looking into shop windows until I am bored.
I decide that I do not want to be in the town and I return to the bridges. I am driving in a car now although I do not remember getting into a vehicle. I take the turn‑off for the bridge on the left toward the forest across the water. I drive quickly and the car drifts to the right, onto a platform between the bridges formed by their sidewalks. Where the bridges diverge their sidewalks stop forming a platform and I drive along the cables of the bridge on the left.
I drive up the cables to the top of the tower, from which I drive into the air in an arc toward the water. At zenith I lose mass and drift gently, like a snowflake, to earth. On the ground I find myself standing on my back porch. The sun is rising and I am looking toward the east. Although this is of the clearest mornings I cannot even see as far as the mountains surrounding Hope.
The phone rings and I wait for someone to answer it, but no one does. I turn toward the house, away from the light and go in and pick up the handset. The phone does not stop ringing.
I look at the receiver and slowly understand that the ringing is not the phone but is the sound of my alarm clock calling me back to the other place, to the place where, as a friend once joked, without physics nothing matters. It is time for me to return to the consensus world. So I go…
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