Star Trek... but it's changed. Mr. Spock has a dark blue-gray face, as if carved from slate, or a thundercloud. An Assyrian beard adds still more weight. He broods alone in a shuttlecraft, wrestling with some inner demon. Zero gravity: he floats, suspended in a psychological dilemma.

Why? What's he found out?

Back on the Enterprise, the ship's computer makes an announcement: a famous cabaret singer and erotic dancer has come aboard! I'm startled at the tone: the loudspeakers practically leer, with that smarmy tone that some guys use to hide that women scare them. In all these centuries, hasn't sexual politics changed at all?

I meet the dancer in the lounge. We get to talking about our childhoods. Hers was extraordinary. She started out as a cow, basically--a calf of the dominant species on a rural planet. The cow people feared and avoided aliens, since most are carnivores or omnivores, not vegetarian, like truly civilized folks.

But her dad was a progressive bull, interested in aliens; she grew up fascinated by the photos he collected of interstellar travel and galactic culture. The first chance she got, she got out of cow town.

Ashamed of her roots, she scraped up the money to get genetic sculpting. She transformed herself... and not just once.

First time, she streamlined her quadrupedal self into a sleek horselike creature with a big mane--still recognizably a grass-eating creature, but like a slender Hollywood blonde compared to her chunky, stolid birth-people.

Next, she saw a National Geographic article on sharks. She tells me frankly "I got all shivery and wet over their terrible grins... At first I went looking for a guy who had that wild predatory look, but he didn't make me happy, nor did the next sharky boy, or the next. At last, I decided that to possess what I longed for, I shouldn't just MATE with it, but BECOME it." And so she went to her gene surgeon again and added a long V-jaw with big sharp teeth. A shark grin!

But that didn't work out too well. You see, she liked PLAYING with the impression that she was an elegant predator... but she really was too tender-hearted to hurt anyone. Her herbivorous heritage ran too deep in her character--she had the teeth but not the belly for it.

So for her fourth incarnation, she had her shark genes removed, and this time made herself over as a biped like us. Otherwise she's much like her second self--slender and elegant with a big blonde mane flopping down in her eyes. Adorable, hot, a big, sweet, loud boy toy, and I can see why the computer was drooling.

Only she's no Barbie. She's been mulling over Spock's Dilemma ever since she heard about it, and she thinks she has a solution. Everyone else has been agonizing over it ineffectively, so they're desperate enough to listen even to a stripper.

Her answer has to do with a pass or saddle between low hills of spacetime. Events stack up there in the pass--they get dense, and cause the problem. How, exactly, I couldn't recall when I woke.

All I did know was... the singer, the cow turned bimbo, who lacked the bite to be a shark... HER answer turned out to be right.

THE NEXT DAY

I recognized the strangely mutated Spock. He looked exactly like a recurring dream character of mine, THE HEDGE KING, a guy concerned with setting limits and boundaries. And the singer felt like Silky, another recurring part who's into sex, play, socializing, and singing, and is way smarter than her bubbly personality seems.

But why the cow, and the shark grin, and the mystery, and the low pass? How can you have a pass in space? Bothers me all morning...

Then my friend Alder invites me out to a wonderful Swedish film, HOUSE OF ANGELS. It's set on a farm belonging to an old man who died in a road accident that might not have been accidental. All around the low pass/saddle where he crashed, complex secrets stacked and swirled.

After his death, his granddaughter (Helena Bergstrom) a blonde cabaret singer with the face of the singer in my dream, shows up on a motorcycle driven by her gay/bi buddy/boyfriend, a raffish creature with a sharky grin. She claims the farm! Dodging cows and horses on her scooter and scandalizing the conservative farm community with her sexy parties, she sets out to clear up her grampa's death.

And she does.

While incidentally clearing up certain questions of my own.

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sh - Si-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites