Dreams of Ascending and Descending

I fell asleep and dreamed that two middle-aged female folkdancers tried to trick me out of my debit card by seducing me into a hotel room adjoined to the dance hall. On their bed I found, in the nick of time, piles of old debit cards which they had pickpocketed from other dancers. I checked my wallet and stormed out of the room. The next evening during the same dance party, a food competition took place. The idea was to cook an appropriate, symbolic or favourite meal for the person you most loved or admired, place the ready meal on their bed pillow, and then have an event-wide taste contest for all the dishes. The winning dish would be paraded by the winning couple - either a new or an established romance. I went to my own bedchamber and found smack upon my pillow a large leafy 'Welsh Salad', and it was labeled as such in big letters. Runes had been scrawled on my blankets and walls, but when I read them I realised that the language and lettering had been bastardised. Some guests came by and I tried to explain to them how Anglo-Saxon and Norse worked ... to no avail. The same two female folkdancers appeared in my room, dipping their bare fingers into my Welsh Salad and putting the dressing covered bits into their mouths, licking their fingers, sticking their fingers back in the greens as they said "mm mmm mmmm!". They asked me why I liked Welsh things, Norse things, Irish things, English things. I began to give them a beautiful reply and then stopped: They were mocking me. Why should I tell them anything? The Welsh Salad wasn't Welsh food after all, nor made in my honour. They had not the slightest understanding of me, my devotions, passions, or timewoven branches of influence. [17 April 2011]

I dreamed that I walked in the sky with friends upon 'monkey bar bridges', connected by spiral stairways up & down. I decided to crawl along a sky-way by myself, going into a metal tube twisting & spiralling through the sky, big enough for one adult to inch through feet-first. The sky-tunnel was filled with children playing. I become claustrophobic, worried I won't get through, or that I'll get trapped by people somewhere in its long twisting length. [20 April 2011]

Two days later, I go on a 'history walk' in a German city. A railway with only one above-ground crossing courses through town. Cars & people must use underpasses. I go down into tunnels on the tour: the Guide takes us from room to room, in which a living history exhibit can be seen across all eras as if it's occurring in present time. 18th & 17th centuries seem most widespread. Period Germans sit around long banquet tables. Guide points out 'Königin Elisabet' & describes her reign. She sounds & looks a lot like *our* Queen Elisabeth I, I remark. ! We eventually come to a room entitled 'Scientific Racism' & the Guide cleverly points out how it is a far worse form of racism than that of any earlier period. A black man present interprets this as a novel idea: "Scientific racism must have led to unthinkable atrocities", he says. [22 April 2011]

The following day I'm in a Rem-Wisconsin work residence - a rather stuffy house, and I'm trying my best to support my client when my close friend (Pretton Finnskir) suggests I escape with him through the walls. We wind through passageways in the walls between the rooms until we find an opening onto the roof. At this point, he disappears. I'm left trying to find a way down from the roof. He roars up with a pickup truck pulling a wagging wagon. I motion for him to drive the wagon closer to the house eaves so I can safely jump down. He doesn't get it and stays put. I yell at him then to push the wagon closer. Still he doesn't do it. I yell again, putting it in the firmest, plainest words. He doesn't move. He's impossible, I think. I then notice the wagon is in free motion, distached from the truck, wheeling toward me. It makes a curve and swings lengthwise past the house. I leap down as it passes - using the wagon's own momentum to break my own fall. As I land, my feet push the wagon horizontally faster, and I crouch in it as it speeds away from the house. Escape from America? [23 April 2011]

Then five days after that I find food thrown away outside which I try to salvage by cooking. The food consists of gigantic beef hearts - and I look on all the meat with concern and value, and decide I will cook it, save it, eat it, thrive off it. I come upon a lame husky dog - the dog and friend of my childhood - whom I heal by raising him to walk beside me, and guiding him between two walking poles attached to a halter. Soon he is his prancing self again. Next I'm indoors in a room that looks like a hair salon and I witness overweight women giving each other 'grief therapy' by cuddling each other in big chairs. [28 April 2011]

In the same sequence of sleep, I go into a huge house-hotel where students have stuffed their papers, books & tp in the lavatories, blocking them from use. Dance parties move from room to room. Former Madison co-opers fill the parties, & none would engage me with dance or conversation. Many would not even brave human eye-contact. The event shifts to a German ball with German speakers talking to me and making steady, engaged eye contact. Their dramas and balls shift from room to room as in _Russian Museum_, & I have to work to follow them or dance with them. Then I find myself on a Jutland west coast watching eel fishermen stuff long eels into groundtanks accessible through small holes - just big enough to slide an eel into. The fishermen work for a while as I watch and listen to their Danish, able to understand bits and pieces. A huge wave rises up offshore. They call to me in Danish to help them build a stone wall to protect their catch. I lift big stones to help them as they speak in clipped Jutlandic in the wind.

The scene shifts to my mom & dad's Michigan pond - which is now a longer Oval with a bridge over an inflowing stream at one end, & a house veranda leading down to the bridge, the walkboards lined with marsh flowers, sedge & reeds. I look in the water & see the whole pond slither. It's teeming with long serpentine creatures: They have heads like puff adders with fangs, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, eyes like bulbous frog eyes. I probe one with a long stick - it sticks to the stick, coming up out of the water with Gollum eyes. In fright, I put it back. Run inside to tell Dad & Dennis Hillman (my uncle). Dennis explains to me, "Those mean things are called "Longfang Fishstrikers" & are viscious, killing all the fish in the pond." Then Dad, diplomatic & stoic, trying to be optimistic, says: "But they have beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes." ! A jarring, apocalyptic conclusion contrasting with my own reaction: They were the most ugly water animals I'd ever seen. :-/ [28 April 2011]

The next day, I was running up a steep green hill ending in a cliff over the open ocean. I knew I was dreaming, & laughed like there was no tomorrow. I could leap six feet uphill in a single step. Someone ran next to me: "Be careful", s/he says. I said I could wake myself up anytime I needed, but why do that? Just before I get to the brow up the sea-hill, I think I've really woken up: Instead, I am telling someone *in my dream* that I'd just been 'lucid dreaming'. [29 April 2011]

Now early in May I attended a 'Welsh concert' in a banquet hall *above* a forest. I climbed down through floorboards into trees by swinging my body down onto limb platforms that went lower & lower till I was in a passage-maze in the ground & roots. I walked down a corridor with party decour, saw a two-feet wide passageway to right where Mark Wilkins (Wales) operated on sound systems in the walls. [5 May 2011]

Twelve days later I was bouncing up & down hills & wet, snake-filled valleys. The hills turned into couches (fellowship spots), the valleys writhed with purple, green & blue snakes, worm-like, most venomous in the world. Antedote to bites, according to one witness (BMH), was to arc up & down the couches & dales bionic-man style. I leaped up & down pogo-like btw cosy sofas & snakey marsh. Then looked at the vessels in my arms - they were swimming with 'snake-larvae'. Won't they grow bigger & burst the veins? [17 May 2011]