THAT DAY
A cold foggy morning. My friend Danita bought two dream-art prints; I drop them off at her house and we talk about dieting and body image and the health issues that plague us both.
In the afternoon, I head downtown. Hypnotherapy with Shelley. Work on a nightmare that's haunted me for months: The Mummy, in which a man I murdered mummifies in a hotel lobby and no one notices but me. Is it real, or a guilty hallucination? Shelley, my therapist, is intrigued that it was suspended between the 7th and 8th floors; my dad died at 76, and she wonders if the corpse is guilt about not visiting him in the hospital more. "That one failure seems to have convinced you you're unloving, unfit for love. But fear of hospitals isn't coldness!" It's true I get sick from visiting hospitals--people with EI (environmental illness) often do. Add the immunological assault to the emotional stress and it's no wonder I avoided visiting.
At the session's end, I feel just as guilty, but I'm a bit more skeptical about those feelings.
In the evening, Cory drops by--a fellow shaman. We gossip about other dreamworkers. Cory has a dim view of Psychic Horizons, a local meditation school. They're obsessed with snipping all threads of influence and connection, enforcing boundaries, exorcising spirits... creating cleanly isolated souls. Very American! Cory figures we're all mixed up, with permeable boundaries; that's normal. Shamans expect relations between our spirits to be as complex as any other ecology...
She's living in Mike and Nic's spare basement room these days. I'm surprised she can stand it--I always found it grim down there. Well, Cory knows. The old man who lived there before Mike & Nic shot himself in her current room! She's had dreams of him butchering animals as well as killing himself. The place feels soaked in old violence; seeps from the walls like blood. I knew he died in the house, but not the gory details... She's coping with it, trying to partly cleanse it--where I'd just leave.
Funny. Cory and I shared a flat for a year, and her room had a ghost. Previous tenants had complained about it. Maybe Cory just likes spooky bedrooms, I don't know.
I promised Shelley to ask for a follow-up to the dream of the Mummy. Though I remembered several times during the day, I forget at night.
But my dreams don't!
THAT NIGHT
I'm a skinny white woman, about 25, waiting on the steps out in front of the lobby of a hotel in Serramonte, the ridge west of San Francisco International Airport. I'm waiting for my mom to show up in an old white station wagon. Other junk-filled beat-up station wagons appear, spewing smoke, but not my mom's. A bunch of us plan to drive in a convoy, north into San Francisco... which is Mordor. You know, where Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, rules from his Dark Tower: the Bank of America.
My job: to destroy the golden ring in my pocket. A ring I dare not wear. The One Ring.
It won't be easy. Sauron's followers aren't common here in the shopping malls of Serramonte, but as we head north, they will be.
In front of the hotel is a shabby wooden shed painted in lurid colors. What a weird place for it! Looks a lot like Cory's bedroom in that flat we shared in the City years ago--the haunted bedroom. But no ghosts bother me here; just a loud, out-of-place paint job.
At long last we head north into the City. I want to stay on the freeway and slip past as many of Sauron's forces as possible before he even notices we are there. Wheels mean speed!
Other factors are in our favor, too. All nine of us have Rings of Power! And not the ones Sauron made for mortal men.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Among our nine wearable rings (the One stays in my pocket, and not just to keep it secret; it's as seductive as a drug, and I dare not wear it) are elven-rings, dwarf-rings, and... it seems five rings were forgotten in that old rhyme! One, three, seven, nine... it seems obvious once you look. Were they made for the hobbits, or the Ents perhaps? Ringlore always overlooked those two peoples. For the Three and Seven we have long histories, and as much as we want to know about the One and Nine... but not the Five. I worry that these undocumented rings are as addictive and deadly as the One and the Nine. But they seem cleaner than the Seven, perhaps even as clean as the Three never touched by Sauron at all. And our tests proved they pack some genuine firepower. In Mordor, we may need it. I wear a silver band; one of the Three, or of the Five? Known or unknown?
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Frankly, I'm not telling you which. Just in case word got around to the wrong Tower.
But there are other weapons than force. I'm about to encounter one. The freeway ends at last. We proceed on surface streets as far as we can. But in the end, I must walk to the Cracks of San Andreas and cast the Ring in.
And on the path, I meet my first follower of Sauron face to face. He's a sorcerer, but he doesn't try to fight me--he uses sex appeal instead. And I'm sorry to say it works! I'm single, lonely and frustrated... that makes me vulnerable. A few smiles and compliments and his gentle touch on my skin, and... I'm in a strange trance, as if I'm both living and reading my story at once. Passively following the text--which he can edit!
But if that's the purpose of his seductive spell, it backfires a bit. For I may be a naive and hungry lover, but I'm an experienced reader. And I notice as a reader that I'm losing my sense of I. That is, "I" starts getting edited off the page! But if it's meant to disappear entirely, he's failing. It's replaced by typographical substitutes: £, T, 1, the Chinese characters shàng or xià (meaning above and below), and a few archaic characters that do mean "I" but are little used today. Roundabout ways of retaining "I" while complying with him! My sex-starved soul wants to lose myself in his sweet talk, his sweet touch... but not totally!
Even with no sense of J, just a sense of £, 1 retain my purpose. Xià don't stagger up the path past him, but... RINGBEARER do. Shàng pull out the Ring and know, somehow, not to slip it on my finger in some wedding-bliss. Not with THIS boy! SINGLE GIRL throws it desperately down into the San Andreas Cracks, the Fault dividing the world... and the world is healed.
As I wake, I think "Hey! Buddha was right! Guess I don't NEED an I... not that it hurts, but I got the job done without. Or do I have the other ring to thank for that?"
And then: "Damn! I forgot to incubate a follow-up dream on that nightmare I worked on with Shelley. Wait, it's early; I can go back to sleep and have one more short dream on the subject." Scribble the Sauron dream on the pad by my bed, by dim dawn-light, and go back to sleep. (Or so I thought! In fact, it was the middle of the night and I was still dreaming, for when I woke again, it was still predawn and all my dreamnotes were gone. Yet... because I'd written it out once, I remembered it hours later--whole REM cycles later! False waking and dissolving dream-notes aren't always a joke or a cheat. Like £, they can be indirect solutions!)
I wake for real at 5 AM to find an empty notepad. There's still time for one more dream, but first I must write the Sauron one. At least I'm practiced at that by now! By the time I'm done scrawling, I'm not sleepy, can't slip back into dreaming. Oh well! A dream on the pad is better than a hypothetical one...
NOTES ON WAKING UP (second try!)
ACTION!
1: Throw away guilt. Looks precious, but it's unwearable. Throw it down the Fault! The guilt-ring is based on romantic ideals--what true lovers do, what kids who love their dying parents do... It splits your world into tectonic plates--good over here, wicked over there. And between? Earthquakes!
2: Also, start dating again--anyone likable and sexy. Don't be too picky--don't let romantic perfectionism take over!
Short of fucking an agent of Sauron, that is. Never a good idea.
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