Boywomancat

I wake into a glass walled room, sunlight filtering in from one side, settled into a chair. A face is nuzzling itself into my neck, and the body lies almost limp in my arms. I'm saying things, things that fade away, to this person, things of some consequence. All I get in response are tighter clutches and that mute pressing of the face into my neck. Someone sitting across the room asks me why the person falling onto me is nuzzling me. I fumble an answer, but really, I have no idea who it is. Boy, woman, cat? Past lover, future friend? I don't even know who or what I am; suspicions of homosexuality arise and are dismissed: I know the feeling, and this is not it. There's something secret about this meeting, and the body trying to hug me. It hurts. And I don't know how to respond to this creature that has no sex, and perhaps all sexes. All this while, people come and go, information is exchanged, and all the while that constant nuzzling. Now I realise I'm dreaming.

We're standing in a department store. It has a lot of supplies, and almost no food. Everyone I've met so far is here, including the boywomancat from the previous scene. But it is boywomancat no more, and only the most precious thing I have ever known, and this person has a name that I cannot speak, for it is not made of words.

Presently there is a commotion; some sort of attack is being made upon my friend. Do not ask how I know all this - I only know that there are two factions clashing here and one of them is out to get my friend. I shout for him to run away, and he (why is it a he?) dashes out through a set of double doors. Our job is now to delay the attackers so they cannot catch him. By now I feel like I'm in the middle of a Harry Potter story, and well it might have been, but I'm terribly surprised about it, the way it feels almost natural.

I'm in the midst of a frenzy. The air is thick with flying objects. I'm in the air too - dodging and ducking and throwing things around. I find myself faced by two women, and I determine to stop them from getting past me. A furious encounter begins. Nothing I do is effective. Then I realise that metal hurts "them", so I throw whatever metallic objects I can find - keys, staples, mops even - at the women. Duck, throw, canter, veer up and down. I throw and miss, again and again. I'm desperate now, and the air takes on the same quality. Movements, slow, time dilates, anything I throw describes a deliberate arc before it connects. Shelves lose their moorings and gently bob up and down, and everything moves at differential speeds.

A mop I throw hits one of the women, who clarifies into a voluptuous creature. She taunts me, apparently unhurt: give me more, give me more. I hate her, and I'm more furious than ever.

Now I feel a burst of sexual energy welling up; a phallic swelling convinces me of my identity - I'm me again, the guy me, not just the human me. So I throw myself at her, wanting to overcome her physically; if that was the only way I could stop her, I would.

And I careen into her, and throw her against a wall. But there's a flash of light, and 'they' are gone. There are bodies scattered against the wall, remnants of a battle scene; shortly, they are lined up against a wall - a hundred pellucid victims, pounded into pitiful distortions. The women I was fighting have turned into two doll-like figures of cheaply painted glass; trinket women shorn of life, like Galateas forsaken by their maker. I feel that hurt again, a throbbing numbness enfused with shock and adrenalin. These two were taken a week back, I hear someone say. A massive sense of trickery and cunning and being used pervades the place. All the casualties are three foot glass dolls now, post-modern mummies - they might have been made by IKEA.

A thousand feet of balance

It's over. I feel the urge to get out, and fly. I'm outside now, leaning gently into the wind. I haven't flown in dreams for a while now, and I'm afraid I'm not going to do it properly. Easy boy, gently now. Spread arms, feel the wind make your eyes water, sing the wind, lose the ground. Breathe. Ever so uncertainly I miss the ground. And I'm surer now, ascending steadily into the sky, facing down, drifting backwards, rising both with and against the wind. The landscape below me is a strange confoundment of geographies - lone skyscrapers of the first world amidst a terrain sparsely dotted with small flat-topped cement houses of the third world. And the trees, gentle rounded puffs. And earth, reddish against the melancholy dusk. I must be close to the power lines now - I always find power lines in the stratosphere when I fly. Humming steel and chrome, warning of a liquid primum mobile they carry. So close, where are they? I'm about to hit them, I know it. Still soaring backwards, I bump into one, then another, banging my way upwards through the electric flock. Now above them, unhurt, un-electrocuted, but tingling, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from that close flirting with intense potentials. But I haven't forgotten how to fly, and it feels good. And peaceful. Images of the battle flicker through my mind, but they're fading. I want to forget. If the clouds don't end, I will never return to the earth.

I fly.

Have you ever been to an Olmec ball game? Of course you haven't, the Mayans left this earth long before our seeds were sown. All we have of them is constructed from fragments, like faintly misremembered images evoked by shards of memory, and ruins in the collective conscious. The Mayans are a dream we are trying to remember. But I am not at a Mayan ball game. Drifting in the cirrus garden is something that has the form of an Olmec ball game court, but with features of my old school playfield, the closeness of a jai-alai arena, the openness of a greek temple, a red brick structure lined with shrubs at the top. It is beginning to decay, and there are people all over it, watching me as I enter the V-shaped arena. I know all of them. I can't see a single face, but I recognise old friends, passing acquaintances. I have been here before; or I have been to parts of here, never to this wholeness. This place is a memory I'm trying to dream.

Time for me to land. I gently place a foot on an octagonal tile. It crumbles beneath my touch, exposing the view below. Then another, and another. Finding foothold here is hard. So I try again, and hear them again, those cheers. This time the ground is firm. I touch down on the platform, and enter...

The Fox Theater

... or a similar structure. I'm standing at the base of a spiral staircase, abutting on a balcony. I have been here before, too. And yet, it feels more like jamais vu than deja vu. The place is packed with people, glittering bodies jostling against one another. I think I have walked into a movie premiere. Glitter all around - signs, bodies, even the building is golden-hued, opulent against the setting sun. It makes me want to run. So I run, up the staircase, thrusting my way through. And back down, seeking an exit. There is none, only an endless sea of half-exposed bodies, the building looming above and around me, and that omnipresent glitter. Where is the outside? And what am I looking for?

I wake, shuddering. None of this happened, and yet it happened. It has taken two hours of my life to dream this. It takes me a month to write it all up. Because it must be written. Because these images will always haunt me. Because no one will ever understand.