It's night. A huge fire in the hearth, burning my feet. But I must not move them, or show pain, for I'm an ambassador of my culture here, and I mustn't show weakness. This is a Moslem place. It's safe in the day, in the white corridors, but going alone outside is risking death; and at night nowhere is safe. Packs of polite young children wander at night; they smile, look around to see if adults are near, and then pull out the knives and sabers and hack their victims into bloody chunks. I barely escape a group in late afternoon in broadleaf green woods at a ruined Frank Lloyd Wright house. They walked down one of the tilted beams in a line, solemnly, in no hurry, and I fled.

The adults are far more civilized: they'll only cut off the hands of an outsider found anywhere they forbid. They chop them with apologetic regret. But they still chop them.

Fleeing a deadly little kid down a whitewashed hall, I enter such an area. I'm caught--I explain fast, with the knife at my wrist, already cutting in a little. I'm let off with a warning--this time. Reprieved!

I don't like these people.

Yet, in the night, I see them dancing, couples scattered in great arcs, each on top of flowing rocks (do they really move? Not sure!) by spiral moonlight, each ray helicing down its long axis... The truth slowly dawns on me as I float invisible over the magic scene: Islam is just a cover story. This community keeps to itself because they're really shipwrecked aliens. Their world is snow; and they only can live here where snow is near. When they know I've guessed, they decide to show me all.

In Northern California, snowy-branched pines stand on Yolla Bolly Mountain. A line of snow people walk onto them, floating as if weightless. They are; with snow, all things are possible. They tell me an underground vein of ice connects this village with the Sierra Nevada, so they can go from here to the rest of the state. I feel more and more sympathy for these castaways despite their violence; they're trying to return home, slowly repairing their ship. I try to fix the radio for them... and half-wake.

Someone in the group of aliens is behaving strangely. Violent even by village standards! They get worried, and start discreetly guarding me. But one night at 3 AM, sleepless, I walk down a hall. Spot a man down the hall who I never trusted; follow him quietly. He slinks into my room, steals my milk--my hiking milk! I grab him and yell for help. A friend on the alien council comes and pins him down. The thief struggles to drink the milk. I yell to my friend "Drink it so the addict won't get it." For that's what he is: a milk junkie. That's how it affects these people. My friend, after a moment's struggle in his mind, drinks it, a little too eagerly.

I enter an elementary classroom where a friend teaches. I draw her aside and ask her, embarrassed, "Is milk only addictive, or is it mind-altering too?"

"Both," she sighs.

I worry my friend will get hooked; I'm at fault.

After this incident, it's clear to all that they must leave this world: their magic, their floating dance, their songs and basic gentleness is not going to survive in our world, with its innocent traps, like milk--OUR little smiling kids with hidden knives. They must go, before milk addiction hooks them all.

NOTES:

• Snow = frozen emotion? Gives them magical powers.
• Milk = emotional nourishment, mothering... Addictive and toxic for others, yet not for me? Weird. I don't get this dream.

SIX DAYS LATER

I go to a friend's film class, where they show their final projects. One film is a parody of REEFER MADNESS, a "public health warning" film about... milk addiction! "It's turned so many kids to crime and violence! Alert yourself to this public menace!"... and so on.

Now the dream makes more sense!

YEARS LATER

The treacherousness and danger I sensed in ordinary college life was understandable: I was a weird, fragile kid who didn't yet realize how different I was. But the dream's more specific--perfectly ordinary foods turned out to be toxic to me. The dream was warning I had serious food allergies I'd overlooked. Yet it's no simple health warning either: milk isn't one of my land-mines! The milk addiction theme makes no sense at all except as an arrow pointing at a film I wouldn't see for a week yet--rubbing my nose in ESP, violating all I believed about physics... then.

Revealingly, when I indexed my journals for that year, I "corrected" the index to list the dream a week later, right after the film, since it was obvious from the title that the film must have inspired the dream. Evidently, I "corrected" my memory too! I assumed this was a simple cause/effect dream for years. But when I went back to the raw notebooks themselves, reading them straight through, looking for dreams worthy of posting on this site, I was astonished to find that in the original pages, the chronology was unmistakable--I dreamed this a week BEFORE the film!

Anti-ESP skeptics make much of wishful thinking, how we tend to see ESP in mere coincidence, even distorting memories to make them more dramatic. This dream's an example of wishless thinking, of anti-dramatic distortion. At the time, I was barely able to concede there might be something in telepathy, but predicting the future? No way! That'd interfere with free will! Since I "knew" that this couldn't have happened in the order it did, I evidently censored my memories to conform to my culture's notions of linear time! Memory distortion works both ways. Watch what you wish for! Some wish for magic, and turn mundane coincidences into ESP. Some wish for stability and logic... and imagine away ESP! The notion that only the credulous are self-deluding is the most credulous stance of all.

So, like an earthling in a village of milk-addicted aliens, the wise stance is alertness. Throw out all the theoretical baggage you can--and remember that even so, you're still drugged by your assumptions. Your personal milk addiction.

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