I'm in a stone maze. Stelae and fountains. Overhead, in the open sky, swim deadly air-sharks. Like their sea- kindred, they can't pause; must prowl to breathe. So they dare not squeeze into our narrow, dead-end alley-labyrinth. Long as we live low and hidden, we survive. But rear on a wall and wide- jawed sharks swarm. So when any of us tire of scuttle dim, it's how we go. I'm a Zen monk with a weird disease: my body bubbleholed like some swiss cheese advancing cancer-slow: weekly, pieces go. So I strip naked, bare my holy truth and stand out above the horde: choose the faster pain. What loss? Already I'm windowed. Cored. Those who rule deny this plague wasting me and many. So as I die, why not expose, accuse? A friend sits quiet by mute me, prepared to bear witness. When they lie.

NOTES

• The original text of this dream: is lost. I was in an abusive relationship at the time, and most of my journals from mid-'77 to mid-'78 were destroyed--a hole in my life. But I never forgot the dream, it was too vivid; and some dream-notes did survive, helping me reconstruct details.
• The scene (and the illustration!) are from Barbarella (the French comic by Jean-Claude Forest, not the movie with Jane Fonda; I hadn't seen it yet). In the city of Sogo, the poor and rejected live in a stone maze. Here Barbarella witnessed a suicide: a man riddled with holes like Swiss cheese climbed up on the maze-wall, knowing the air-sharks would kill him. Better fast than slow.
• My dream changed four elements from Forest's scene:
  1. In Barbarella the maze was a hungry, broken-down slum, not a place of fountains and columns; my dream beautified it.
  2. Barbarella merely witnesses a plague-stricken man commit suicide; I dream I AM the victim.
  3. Barbarella's man wears a loincloth; I dream I strip naked, to refute our rulers' cover-up of the plague
  4. In Barbarella the suicide's subtly political; but I'm explicitly protesting, like the Vietnamese monks who burned themselves to protest Nixon's napalm.
• Those holes: in 1978 I was sick, weak, skeletal, and in a lot of pain--but doctors dismissed it all as psychosomatic! Since it later responded to antibiotics, I'm fairly sure now it was unrecognized Lyme disease or a similar parasite. Lyme spirochetes are shaped like microscopic living drill-bits; they literally bore holes in you.
• The coverup now looks literal too: the CDC still denies Lyme can turn chronic, denying us treatment; yet insurance companies are quite willing to say we're infected, so they deny us coverage for having a prior condition. If the dream sounds angry and martyred, I had reason.
• Illness or abuse? I've assumed here that the dream was about my illness, not the battering I faced; it was no secret, my friends & family believed me, and I escaped just a month or two later. On the other hand, I was sick for decades--and was consistently misdiagnosed and disbelieved.
• Holy, hole-y: wow, do my dreams love puns.

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