The following is a transcription of a transcription taken on February 6th at 9:18am. It was written as a message to two friends of mine. It is now 3:30pm on February 19th. Some details of the dream have mysteriously altered since that first morning (memory is a fickle mistress haha). At any rate, I think this conveys how I felt about the experience sortly after. Enjoy:
aaaaaah my pets. its day two of a strange level of mental activity... hmmm its not activity... its more like a state of tension.... like violin strings vibrating on a single piercing yet beautiful chord. so. last night i had the most interesting sleep in recent memory. it was as if it i had entered a state of restful bliss and contentment while maintaining a state of neutral consciousness... or a state of unconscious clarity. needless to say i had many dreams. but the one im going to describe to you happened right before i "woke" up which means that it was the most intense and also the most memorable. but anyways, for some reason i was in a luxury high rise apartment owned and maintained by my cousin's family. but actually said cousin is not important to the story as much as his dad is. in fact, his dad is not that important either: his brother is (but in reality he doesnt have a brother, its a dream you see). sooooo, all of sudden my girlfriend in this dream is lee's pseudo-cousin carmela. she's standing behind me, wrapping her arms tenderly around my waist. and sitting on the couch are my uncle (in a sort of patrician head of the household kind of pose), and beside him is his slightly younger brother who is not gay (he is perhaps carmela's father in the dream... actually no b/c she refers to him as uncle so and so)... well anyways he is not gay but he is one of those incredibly funny, charismatic, goofy uncles who are the only reason a person bothers attending family functions at all. so anyways, he is sitting there beside his stern brother with a kind of benign slightly mischievous look on his face, and then carmela (all the while embracing me ever so tenderly) tells this super hilarious anecdote about said funny uncle and how he has a habit of crouching into a cartoon-farting position and secreting a pheromone from a pouch on his posterior that makes everyone love him. then as soon as she's done telling him, said uncle does that same action with the most comical look on his face and it is the most pleasant and funny dream i have ever had and i felt i had to share it with the two of you cuz i love you mutherfuckers and i more than likely am in love with your "cousin" carmela, no offense to her charming boyfriend who i met a few times. okay, ive got to teach class now. this took me all of 7 mins to write train-o-thought style, can you tell??
Hmmmm, I confess to feeling a little bit _______ about having put that down. My brain is interpreting this feeling and offering up the word "guilty" to insert into this blank. However, from experience I believe "guilt" is the singular repository for a whole range of emotions and colors, as if instead of a pot o' gold there was a mouldy dustbin waiting at the end of the rainbow. Not that there isn't a lot of toxic sludge that is rightfully deposited into the concept "guilt"... Okay so a rainbow and a septic spew hole terminate in the same metaphorical dustbin. Shutup. Anyways, much that is indicative of the richness of human experience gets forced into a rancid pool to be tainted first and then to contribute to that same taint second. It's really quite ridiculous because just last week I was revelling in the idea of this moment. Because really, what is a good dream?
A good dream is teasing your eyes to the edge where the world drops away into blue and each step feeds a tightness in your chest and your breath becomes shallow and your soul coils to spring and then with an titanic leap you are ripped from yourself your consciousness trailing behind you and your body screams with a clear vibrating tension to explode into true sensation, true depth, true color...
Right? I feel so damn clean to say it, like that first shower after my hair has been freshly shaved. So obviously "guilt" (for lack of a better term) has no place in the above, right? That leaves me to believe that it comes from the act of expressing, itself...
(4:30 pm) After sitting on this for a while, here's what's hatched. You know that important decision you have to make whenever you leap? You know, "leap or don't leap"? Don't you find that especially when your body is committed another little part of yourself sometimes tries to halt that decision the instant before your feet separate from the ground? Every one's done it. Some people have even ended up as mangled pulpy masses massaged frothy red by the waves after doing it. But maybe the physics of expression are not quite as brutal. So rather than bloodying your forehead and scraping your leg, you are suspended. (11:00 pm on February 20th) As if time stops at the moment where you have violated every equilibrium maintaining mechanism in your body, the point where the delicate illusion of the "You Who Can Stand" lays broken at your awkward feet. The sneaky way that it makes you aware of your mortality is subtle, embarrassing and disturbing, like Death flicking you on the forehead.
Just like tripping is a matter of timing, maybe my "guilt" over expressing my dream is a temporal matter. Perhaps I waited too long to "put it out there," so to speak, and as a result I'm floating in the air staring at the safe ground on one side, and the dark swirling waters of possibility on the other hand. Two things come to mind. Firstly, if you strip my metaphor of its trappings and distill its essence what you get is something like a night terror I used to have as a child. I'm not talking "nightmare," I'm talking terror. I used to hallucinate that I was standing upside down staring into an unfathomable blackness. I would have to be forcibly woken up, only to find myself standing in a familiar room made foreign, weeping uncontrollably. The way that the night terror constituted a gross violation of my reality is similar to the whole tripping thing, if only on vastly different scale. The second thing is something that the vice principal of one of my elementary schools said to me today. In a deft but joking way he commented on my characteristic tardiness; not in a nagging mom kind of way, but in a way that summoned me to a moment of self consciousness. I know that I am always late and blahblahblah but something about the way he said it made me feel like I was seeing myself for the first time. So now I am left wondering where I would rather be. Should I stand on the cliff and muse passively about possibilities? Or should I throw myself into the kaleidoscopic maelstrom, abandoning all self-possession for the promise of a pure sensation? But of course there is a third option that I find myself drawn to; so much so that in writing this I have obscured my original purpose of talking about a dream, in order to talk about talking about a dream. Should I be terrified or reverent that the abyss and what it could represent sends tremors through me less and less?
J. J. Baylon
