Dreams

Though it is a simple thing, and often greatly overestimated, the human mind is truly amazing. For as long as I can remember, I have been living in constant fear for my life; and so far as I can tell, I am no less sane than when this all started. Mine is no isolated case, either; though it is not common, I am sure that many humans throughout history have been forced to endure much more concrete and terrifying threats for longer periods of time. My hell, however, is an internal one, built around an irrational fear. On meditation, this is not so different than the majority of people alive today. If only I could take my mind off of it for one second, perhaps I could slip into the banal spiral of mainstream human existence and live happily ever after. After all, in the land of the damned, blessed is he whom might be able to forget.
My curse began simultaneously at birth and two years ago. I can explain it no better than that, for though I can trace it back to a "beginning", I also remember, at that time, the remembrance of experiencing the same feeling throughout my entire life. The "feeling" itself is not necessarily a bad one; it is a surreal, confused feeling of being on the verge of wakefulness. This is the feeling of a lucid dream.
It first came over me while standing on the roof of our local bookstore with my friend Chad, staring up at the harvest moon. It came over me with a sudden sense of urgency, and every fiber of my body wanted nothing more than to wake up. Before I even realized that my perception had undergone a red shift, Chad was holding me back as I struggled to throw myself onto the industrially gridded oblivion of the streets below.
"Not tonight, you sonuvabitch!", he laughed, slurring eloquently. "You can commune with your ancestors on your own time. Tonight, we project our souls to the copper sphere of December!"
Ironically I, the spontaneously suicidal one hanging on to life by the skinny arms of a one-hundred pound ball of hair and tie-dye, was not the one under the influence that night. At that time, my idea of getting "fucked up" still involved flashing gang signals at random people. Chad, however, had taken it upon himself to bridge the gap between the ancient, noble shamans and unkempt community college students. He had ingested a full gallon of fly acaric mushrooms in hopes of speaking to the harvest moon prior to our tricky ascent up Mt. Bookrack. My presence had been requested as a sober trip-sitter.
"This can't be real," I said in a hoarse, panicked voice which I barely recognized as my own. "Is this a dream?" I immediately chastised myself for the cliché, impotent nature of my outburst, but the unnamed panic that had gripped me obscured my thinking.
Chad, however, was on a different wavelength altogether. He said, "Of course this is a dream, but that's no reason to kill yourself!"
"I'm not trying to kill myself!", I retorted, "I'm trying to wake up!"
"Why?", He asked, simply and innocently. I began to answer, and then rethought my answer. Such a divinely simple question deserved a profound response.
"A person who just ate a gallon of fly acaric so that he could have some sort of spiritual vision surely understands what it means to want to see the truth. If you realized you were living a lie, wouldn't you want to wake up?"
"That's where you're wrong, my friend", he said, grinning to the point of malice. "There might be such a thing as 'real', but it hardly matters. What is real, what is truly true, right now, at this moment, is perception. I don't mean just my perception, or your perception, but everyone's perception of everything. There do exist, somewhere, conscious beings, that is apparent, whether it is really us as such or not; and what exists outside of them, independently, would, in theory, comprise reality. So, in a sense, it would stand to reason that dreams are realer than reality, for they represent, symbolically, the perceptual filters of some conscious being, somewhere, as opposed to simply that which is only passing through them, which we naively call 'reality'."
I stared at him for a second. "How hard are you tripping, man?" Despite this statement, I was legitimately disturbed by his diatribe.
"Don't you understand what I'm trying to say?", He pleaded. "That dreams are realer than real can be?"
"Sure", I said, but I was somewhere else entirely. Every dream I'd ever had was passing through my head, and I could see them rearranging themselves, like peices in a tetris puzzle, to fit into what I had previously known as my life. I could effortlessly see the perfect symbolism of all of them, fitting them into past events, both distant and recent. After a while, my mind stopped reeling, and all of my dreams came together into an orange, glowing orb. It wasn't a visual hallucination, but instead a very powerful daydream which overpowered my mind. I was very confused by it at first, since it was the only one of the thoughts which had been running through my head that didn't in some way correspond with my life history. And then I saw it.
"Isn't she beautiful?", Chad whispered to me, seeing where my eyes were focused.
It was too much for me. I started crying on his shoulder. "Do you mean you're seeing this too?" I said, my voice cracking.
"Of course. We did come here for the harvest moon, did we not?"
For far too long, I stared at that beautifully deformed moon. It was the last moment of true relaxation that I ever felt.
The smell of burning rubber wafted up gently from the streets below. Though the smell itself was subtle and relatively benign, it set off a chain reaction in my brain that would completely destroy my concept of consciousness. It was not so much a train of thought as it was malignant, alien thoughts running a train on me.
"Do you smell that?", I asked, my voice barely audible from terror.
Chad flared his nostrils to humor me. "Burning rubber?"
"How did you know exactly what I was smelling?"
"Well, I mean, it's the only thing that's really out of the ordinary, and, I mean, it's not exactly unnoticeable....."
"No! Because I know what's going on now!", I shouted, "Because this is a dream, and you're a part of it, but that smell is real, and I'm burning to death in a structure fire as we speak!"
At that point, he grabbed me, and I could tell he was tripping. He screamed at me, "Well, if that's the case, then you shouldn't stress yourself about it! If you wake up, you wake up, and if you don't, then all well. Enjoy your painless death, you spoiled asshole!" He slapped me for effect. "In the mean time, try not to kill yourself here and now!"
We both sat there above the city, staring down at the rocky gravel of the roof, identical to that of the street. I lit a cigarette to drown out the smell, but it was counter-productive. My anxiety heightened, and as the cherry grew closer to my face, my imminent doom became clearer. I stomped it out after my fifth hit.
Chad started laughing spasmodically. "What if I am just a character in your dream?", he queried shakily, "What if you've dreamed my whole life out for me? What if your dream has..... axe goblins in it?"
Chad had explained away his irrational fear of fairy folk as an aversion to Wiccanism, because of his grandma abusing him or something like that. More recently, various gnomes and goblins had become recurring figures in his bad trips. That was the first hint that I got that I had sent him on one. However, I was involved in something of an existential crisis myself, and there wasn't much I could do.

**********************************************

The second hint I got that I had sent my friend on a bad trip came while I was holding him back from jumping to his death, just as he had done for me not an hour before.
"You wanted a wake-up call?" He shouted angrily, "It's called fear, and it's the only real perception I've ever known! If you really wanted to wake up, you would let me die! And you call yourself a truth-seeker!"
So, deja-freaking-vue, I started thinking that maybe going up four stories to watch the harvest moon might have been a bad idea. The way he was talking, given my state of mind, I might have let him go, too. It was only his earlier speech about dreams being more real than reality that allowed me to hold on.
My feeling of being in a dream never once dwindled, but in fact grew stronger as I consoled Chad and repeatedly told him that gnomes were not, contrary to all of his senses, nibbling his fingers off. I suppose anyone would feel like they were in a dream, given the surreal circumstances. However, I was tormented by the smell of burning rubber, and prayed that I might wake up in time to save myself. After four hours, Chad fell asleep, but I remained awake and haunted.
Finally, after a few hours, I passed out of consciousness and let go of my mind for the night.
*********************************************

Fire and brimstone
caricature of hell
saunter thoughtless through the unknown
but shrink to the smell
mind unbending, prepared for attack
but chained to barbed wire
the cowardice of flesh drags you back
to the brimstone and fire

**********************************************

I do not remember waking up. It seemed as though one second I was huddling with Chad far above the street, and the next I was trapped in a house fire, gasping for breath. Then, suddenly, I was hurled into Starbucks, walking with a group of my friends. Something about this is very wrong, I thought, but I tried to play it cool around my friends. It didn't work for very long.
I pulled Chad aside, my teeth chattering with anxiety and incomprehension. "What happened last night?", I asked.
"I should be asking you the same question!", he laughed.
"I'm serious! How did we get here?"
"'How did we get here?' Man, I shouldn't have let you drive!"
"I drove?"
"Dude, how fucked up are you?"
When he said that, my fear turned to an unexplainable rage. I wasn't in the mood to be called a druggy, especially since I thought I might be going insane. "Do I LOOK fucked up?", I shouted, and then immediately regretted it.
A group of pretty young ladies nearby started giggling. “Do I look fucked up?", they mocked, making fun of my outburst and laughing. At that point, I lost my head. "I'm not on drugs," I shouted, louder than before, "I think I might be dying in a house fire as we speak! This is serious!"
I don't think they heard what I said, however, or at least they didn't pay attention. "Oh, you're cool, you take drugs," mocked a blonde foxen, with more resentment than mirth. “Why don't you just sit in front of a train, hippie?"
"Stupid bitch! You think you're too good to listen to anything I have to say just because I'm an androgynous loser, huh? You think that just because I'm a guy I won't punch you in the face? We'll see who's a drug addict when you need a goddamn morphine drip just to chew your food without screaming!"
Did I mention that I'm sort of a ladies man?
"What's your prob-lem?", they all said, essentially in unison.
"I'm serious!", I continued, "You Vaginal Americans think you're something special just because you can 'create life'! Well you're NOT better than me! You're not even a minority! Why don't you just fight me like a freaking' man!"
So I'll admit that I was going a little crazy at that point, but eighteen years of virginity coupled with the feeling of losing your damn mind will do that to people.
At that point, an angry urban prince charming stepped out of the gathering crowd to uphold some good ol' southern chivalry. "What da hell's yo problem?", barked the do-ragged black knight. "Bein' a pussy and all, you should know how ta treat a ho!"
I decided to approach this new threat logically. "Sir," I said calmly, "do you realize what you are? You are a segregational enabler. By defending these traitors to their sex, you are increasing the gap between the status quo and people such as yourself. Why, the blacks......"
I think that was the point when he started punching me in the face. Now, being a self-proclaimed asshole, I have been hit on numerous occasions. However, this time was different.
At first, I just felt totally apathetic. The first hit took me by surprise, but the following three or four seemed to come in slow motion, as though it took me some effort to even get hit. There was no pain, though, and it felt interesting, even pleasurable, as my nose was split in two on my broken cheekbone.
The fear didn't hit me until I was on the pavement of the parking lot. As the blows rained down on me, I felt a strange sensation. The only way to describe it would be to imagine hundreds of lighters quickly being snapped on and off all over your body, tiny licks of piercing flames. This caused an icy panic to grip my heart, and I could feel burning smoke penetrate my lungs.
Thankfully, the feeling was short-lived. Within seconds, I was out of my head, dancing in the void between wakefulness and void.

**********************************************

She speaks to me in dreams
but ne'er do I see her but in flames
flames releasing the smoke of day
the day which once kept me sane
or as she would say
resewed realities seams
I wish I could say I saw
her materialize to me
my sleep is but captivity
and my dreams tell all.

**********************************************

When I woke up, I wasn't sure if anything over the past few days had really happened or not. All I knew was that the feeling was still there, the feeling that I was still dreaming, and I was convinced that I was somehow experiencing a lucid false awakening. Another dream flashed through my head, but I couldn't place it. It seemed to materialize..... and then vanish...... hooking me again and again with false hope for some kind of breakthrough.
The only thing of my dream that I could remember, once again, was the fire. It tied a knot in my stomach to think about it, but I kept trying, hoping that it would help me wake up somehow. There was a girl.... saying something...... whispering in my ear..... but I couldn't remember what she was saying. Whatever it was, it seemed important.
This sense of importance, however, was soon washed away by the image of my broken body lying in a heap, beneath a cloud of smoke and flames. An innocent look into my bedroom mirror to check for abrasions revealed to me this macabre vision, and forced me to tears.
I ran out to my car as fast as possible and drove to my uncle's house. I couldn't think of anyone else to help me, and I figured this whole thing had started with a pseudo-shamanic incident, so it might well end with one.
My uncle Jeff was, indeed, a shaman of sorts. He had majored in business in college, hoping to be the most well-educated drug dealer in New Mexico. Around the same time, he discovered Aldous Huxley, and the wonders of mescaline. With a flash of inspiration, he attempted to sell peyote on the streets as a spiritual alternative to methamphetamines and cocaine, even going so far as opening his own "temple", a sad half-way between a Native American church and a crack den.
To his surprise, he fell in love with a girl in his business class that was doing essentially the same thing. She was a prostitute who, due to her superb business skills, was pimping herself out better than most professionals with entire harems. After a very messed up business meeting with a large meth producer, in an attempt to merge with his meth lab, in which pretty much all of the participants were on something, his girlfriend was killed, and he never really got over it.
Jeff, at this time, was living out in Arizona, still growing all kinds of mescaline producing cacti, and I desperately needed to find him. After all, he was the only person I knew crazy enough to try to find out what was wrong with me without thinking I was crazy myself. It would really suck to be locked up in a mental institution, the state that I was in.
After an hour, I found his house in a small town just outside of Death Valley. San Pedro cactus grew over six feet tall next to his windows, arms regrowing from where they had recently been harvested.
"Who's there?", he called to me, coming out of his house in his boxers. His skin was blotched and brown, and his stomach stuck out in a small pot-belly. The hair on his face grew together to cover his entire face, except for his brown sparrow eyes which stared at me intently.
"It's me, John"
"Who?"
"Your brother Ned's son"
"Oh, yeah, come on in"
His house smelled overwhelmingly like burning cannabis. Bob Marley incense was strewn throughout the house, but they were largely unburned. Despite the unkempt desert cottage atmosphere, the place was surprisingly clean, and one would get the impression that it was hardly lived in at all.
He brought out a soda from the kitchen and handed it to me. He smiled and said, "I'm sure you're thirsty. I'm all but sure that this is the hottest you've ever been, eh? But that's not important, hydration and all....... I assume you have a reason for showing up uninvited?"
I took a deep breath. "Well.....you're something of a mystic, right?"
"You could say that.", he said. "But then, you could say a lot about me."
I told him everything that had happened to me. After I had finished, he asked me what the girl in my dream looked like. I described her to him in detail.
"Her skin was the whitest white I have ever seen in my life, and she was skinny almost to the point of anorexia. Her nose was long but pinched, elegantly streamlined down the middle of her face, delicately spotted with light freckles. On either side, perfectly symmetrical, lay two clear, dark green eyes with constricted, dark black pupils. Her eyebrows bent at an almost right angle above her eyes, terminating just above the bridge of her nose. She had elven ears and long, curly brown hair that was strangely reminiscent of George Washington. She was wearing a dark black robe......."
"You can remember all this, but you can't remember what she was saying to you?", He asked irritably.
'"Hey, man, I've been trying to remember it all day. Don't push me."
"I'm sorry," He said, and tears welled up in his eyes. "It's just..... the woman you just described.... sounded just like my Jessica."
"Jessica? You mean that girl from your business class?"
"Yes."
"And.... she died in a fire, didn't she?"
"Those goddamn meth heads! When I started selling peyote on the street, I really had higher hopes for humanity, you know what I mean? I knew, that deep down, everybody was looking for something bigger, either something real enough to die for or fake enough to live for. I never would have thought that I'd need to do anything more than say, 'hey, man, do you want to have a life-changing spiritual journey', and I'd have a devoted clientele. But when you get right down to it, all anyone really wants is an escape, security, stasis. It's like the chemicals in these people's heads cry out, 'Have fun! Avoid pain! Get laid', and they never stop to think that maybe they have the wrong chemicals. All I ever wanted to do was supply searchers with the chemicals they needed, but......"
"They blew up the lab," I said, out of nowhere. I was feeling choked up, because I knew it was true, and I didn't know how I knew. "They didn't realize that they had a new batch of meth cooking, even as they were discussing your proposition. You were the only one who lived because you were in the bathroom tripping out of your mind."
"That's correct."
Those two words blew my mind. The world seemed to turn upside down, and I could see through the corner of my eyes a tunnel of fire. I knew then what I had to do.
"I want to try some peyote." I said.
"You don't have to."
"Yes, I think I do.
He took me down into his hidden basement, where what seemed like thousands of little cacti were growing in the darkness. Little white buttons of mescaline formed on their heads like so many trippy little baseball caps.
Jeff picked off seven buttons and gently placed them in my hand. He whispered a prayer and began to tell me what to expect.
"You won't feel the effects for about an hour. You'll probably end up vomiting, but try to hold it in as long as possible. If you start to get the dry heaves, it'll help to smoke a little reefer. Not to force it on you, but it would undoubtedly make your experience more enjoyable, and it's only ten dollars for a dime....."
"No, I'm good", I said. I didn't want to taint the experience and, besides, I didn't feel much like smoking anything anymore.
I sat on the floor and started to meditate. After about an hour, just as Jeff said, the trip started to come on, and I never felt any nausea. I knew that I was starting to feel the cactus as soon as the mongoose came out of the wall and sat on my lap. It seemed completely normal at the time, but for some reason, the words, "you're trippin', man," played through my head over and over again.
I watched him play on the floor for a little while, unblinking, until the world started to float away........

**********************************************

Maybe you're dying
maybe you now are alive
maybe we're all dying
maybe we never were
maybe there's nothing worth dying for
maybe I should be crying
over the width and breadth of her
imagine what it would mean
to know all there is to know
without a filter or screen
to censor the flow
numbers letters music
illusions all
without which humanity would fall

**********************************************

"What did you see?", Jeff asked, gently but firmly.
"I saw her again."
"Did you talk to her?"
"Yes. She said that I was lucky to have something fake enough to live for. She said that I knew exactly what I was afraid of, and I could spend the rest of my life finding a way to get around it, or get over it. She said I was welcome."
"Deep shit."
"Why me, Jeff?"
"That's a dumb ass question. There's six billion people in this world, it has to happen to someone, you know?"
"But how did it work out so perfectly?"
"Again, how did it work out so imperfectly? This same thing could have easily happened to me, and I wouldn't be the human wreckage that I am. Jessica has a point; you're lucky. Everyone has some horrible, irrational fear that keeps them from doing what they want. You have a great advantage, though: you KNOW it. It's right in front of your face instead of buried deep inside you. Now, it's up to you to find out what to do about it. You are still feeling it, right?"
I looked around the room, desperately searching for something that seemed real. Something that didn't scream, "You're in a dream! Wake the FUCK UP!" I couldn't find it. "Yes", I said, "More than ever."
"Good."
"But...... how could I possibly ever get used to this? It's impossible!"
"Nothing is impossible. Are you familiar with Sisyphus?"
"Are you saying that it's possible that somewhere, beneath the earth, some guy is damned to forever push a boulder up a hill?"
"No, not exactly. I'm saying, eventually, Sisyphus has to get used to pushing the same rock up the same hill, right? If you live long enough, you, too, will learn to live with your curse."
"But what if I don't?"
"So?"
"Right."

**********************************************

So, here I am, two years later and two years wiser. I haven't dreamed once since. My life has been considerably less poetic, but more beautiful than ever. Everything looks better surrounded by a ring of fire.
It has been so long, I've almost forgotten what reality feels like. Not a minute goes by without intense terror, but sometimes I forget the difference between terror and euphoria. Sometimes I can even think clearly, and when that happens, I write beautiful things like this. Sometimes I write music, music that's too real and beautiful to ever find it's way to an album. I write poems that will never be read by human eyes. I do things that will never move anyone, except for myself.
Sometimes I can even say that I love my life. I hope, one day, I'll be able to push my rock up that hill without an ounce of regret in my heart. On that day, I will truly be redeemed.