I'm 17. My parents have a party for all my dad's colleagues from the local college. Jim, fortyish, comes with a date: Donna, just 19. His ex-student. Soon they quarrel. She stares moodily out at the cold winter rain.

I retreat from the party early, hide in my room; Donna comes and drags me back out, talks with me. She tells me which English teachers at the college are best--not Jim! (I later find she's right). She pushes a drink at me, though I'm way underage. Next she wants to dance with me. I don't know how and don't want to be the only one trying, with someone else's date, with all my parents' friends staring--and they are.

She sits me down and asks me "why do you feel so uptight?"

"I don't know." Not true. I just feel too shy to articulate the perfectly obvious reasons anyone'd feel uneasy.

I retreat to my room again, turn the light off. But just sit, troubled, wishing I could say yes to her obvious interest. I AM attracted to her.

Donna comes in. "I hope you weren't offended..." I wasn't. Donna comes on. "If you find a girl who turns you on," leaning forward on my bed to show me her cleavage, "let her KNOW."

"I'm just too shy still. I wish I weren't." But am I inhibited, or is it the weird setting and utter lack of privacy?

My first open-mouth tongue kiss. More. I like it. Someone comes by, door's ajar, looks in, apologizes. She says "no, no, it's nothing private..." No?

She leaves a while, returns to the party, placating her date?

Just as I sink into bed and decide to sleep, Donna returns. Talk and kiss some more--but go no further. "You have an exciting mind and an exciting body" she says--but leaves the door open again. If she'd shut it I might feel free to respond.

Though even then... with my dad's friend's date?

• A boy cuts class: I escape the obedient role my parents & teachers want me to play--while they act out sexually.
• Cindy: haven't seen in years, so a symbol--of frenemyship, I think. She teased me a lot but never really hurt me. True of Donna too?
• "Now we are sex": A twist on Now we are Six by A.A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame). I think my dream liked the clash between Pooh and graphic sex.

(dreamed three weeks later still)
2: REDSHIFT AND FAIRIES

Deep in the eco-future. A flock of fairies land on our commune roof--a bee-wing clan of nature sprites. Lovely, but intrusive too; I was kissing Redshift, the dancer who always wears a red shift, and sheer smoke-tights. Soul of the Big Bang! Her nature: expansive! Though she will bang & run. To spite the Sprites, I strew a metric ton of signs they skewed nature's balance. A joke! All the cosmos is exploding, chaos; all change relentless. I drive the fairies up to Sky- line Meadow, but secretly I dye the river red to vex them, as Red, indiscreet, makes sweet love to me on the streambank street.

• Shift: an old word for a chemise or slip; like a tunic or minidress.
• Redshift: the Doppler shift in spectroscopic lines showing that far galaxies recede; the cosmos is expanding. My dream turns this into a girl in a red slip! Why? Because my cosmos was expanding; and the Big Bang starting that expansion was Donna, proving my parents had lied; I wasn't defective and undesirable (as all men are).
• Bang and run: the dream hints Donna's come-on-and-run wasn't what distressed me; it was lack of privacy.
• The Fairies interrupt: some of you have the little devil of your urges and the little angel of your conscience hovering over your shoulders, tempting and scolding. I lack such angels & devils--instead, I get nature sprites who don't object, just... distract. Their concern's the (social?) environment.
• Eco-guilt when the whole cosmos is chaos: Well, it is the Me Decade; adults around me are cutting moral corners. Maybe some of that's due to the new picture of the Violent Universe, not just Godless and impersonal (as it had been since Darwin) but chaotic; life's short & uncertain, so grab it all now!
• The river: the meadows along Skyline Boulevard flank a ridgetop; no such river up there! Has to be symbolic.
• Dye the river red: Menstruation, proving no pregnancy? Hm. Was some of my shyness with Donna worry about contraception if we went further?

(dreamed three nights later still)
3: INCEST OR INSECT?

The redwood hills above my home look raw: they're being mined away--man-gnawed-- cliff-jaws where oakadot meadows once swept smooth up. Now, bones. I climb these new gash-peaks. Find snow. I crest the quarry cliffs, see Cho- molungma; climb Everest itself! Then my hulking Yeti friend teaches me to fly. Night: we cache the Secret in the Gorge. We meet a slender bee, a friend to me. And then my sisters. Lick both till they come! But which both? Sisters, or bee & human? Incest, or insect? Conundrum! Cunnilingual joy, but--whose wings thrum?

• My yeti friend teaches me to fly: maybe my instincts, which certainly prompted me to take risks with Donna.
• Hide the secret in the gorge: Hid with Donna in my room from my parents and teachers.
• Wings, flying: recurring theme. Winged fairies in the last dream; a larger bee-girl here.
• Incest: recurring theme--for good reason, in my dysfunctional family. See "Fifty Years Later" below.

(dreamed four nights later still)
4: SNOW-NEST AND RIVER

In the time of the Solar Conjunction, as we turn half-telepathic, the celebrations in the jungle hills grow wild. The Games Announcer says "New, improved! Now with live bombs!" At the ski lodge we curse the oversnow, so heavy the pass-cornice poufs out like a 'fro on cliff muffin. One man dares--skirts the hang, but finds the slalom grim. Ski Girl & I find refuge in the blob: snow-nest and make love slow. So warm. We're on a river now, air-mattressing down; the Count rides up, and tries to Carry Off the Maiden-- vaudeville villain! Black mare dances in, splash-wades, but flounders in the flow midstream. We, modern, light as leaves, float on--out of the dream.

• High mountains and rivers: echo the last two dreams.
• "Now with live bombs": making out with the date of my dad's colleague. The possibilities are appalling...
• The vaudeville villain: the "feminism" (really just reverse sexism) my mom pushed: men are rapist pigs. Thanks, Mom!
• Black mare: the debut of Silky, my future spirit wife. Jungian anima, Gestalt underdog, and a playful covert rebel. Even here in her first cameo... did she dunk her rider deliberately, so we lovers could escape?

Were these dreams fallout from Donna? Likely. For two months sex was a constant dream-theme; then it ebbed to (merely) teen-frequent.

Did Donna help or harm me? Umm... yes. Both. She made me feel (even more) awkward, backward--socially (if not chronologically) she was way more adult. As a test, swap our sexes--picture college-age Don dumping his much older date Gemma, an ex-teacher using him as a boytoy trophy; Don slips into the bedroom of gifted but shy high-school girl Chris, plies her with alcohol, comes on to her--but with the door open, saying "Oh no, nothing's going on" when clearly it is... and then, with a smile and shrug, moves on. An opportunistic predator, using Chris to slap Gemma for using him.

On the other hand, I felt grateful to Donna. She treated me better than she was being treated (like a trophy, like a doll). She genuinely liked me and took initiative I couldn't, stifled by nosy, sexist, self-indulgent parents and teachers. She was honest and made me feel attractive, and given how I'd been lied to, I needed to be shown.

On the other other hand... I found a box of slides from February 1972. My dad staged photo sessions in the back yard with my sisters. Not nude, but sensual, and the ones with Miriel (age 12!) seductive. So my inhibition and ambivalence wasn't just the family lack of privacy. I was reacting to a dad drooling over his own daughters. I can't even condemn him much; he ogled, but at least kept it in his pants, while his friends were openly screwing their own students.

So given the Seventies, fast and loose... I can't call it abuse. Next to cringeworthy rolemodels like these, Donna's "predation" and my "inhibition" both look like good-hearted attempts to connect... wind-blasted by the Age of Crass.

CHRONOLOGY: these are real dreams from my 1972 journal, but I wrote and drew the pictures, poems and notes in 2023; back then, I couldn't discuss such charged dreams, let alone interpret them. But as I near the event horizon, they've reddened and dimmed... until they're bearable.

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