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Tri-Guardians

Dreamed 2005/8/5 by Wayan

THAT DAY

Cover of book 'Age of Bronze: Sacrifice' by Eric Shanower.


My recurring fever... recurs. Every few weeks for a whole year now, since I first got it right after Burning Man. And still no diagnosis.

I lie around reading Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze: Sacrifice, the story of Iphigenia--her dad Agamemnon kills her to get a favorable wind for the fleet attacking Troy. At first, it's a bit flat--all those bearded, patriarchal, callous men. But it slowly builds; Iphigenia turns downright heroic, and even Agamemnon's not the undiluted swine he first seems. Both are trapped by political forces too big for even kings.

And Odysseus? Troubling and troubled--alarmed by his growing taste for using his cunning to do what even kings can't--shape history.

Shanower's art has a scale and power that justifies his Eisner Award, but I have to remind myself... it's not pure scholarship or art for him. It's a natural labor of love. He loves men, and he picked a project--retelling the entire Iliad--that (by an amazing coincidence) lets him draw all these ripped, athletic gay/bi men!

Me? I want to write about and draw those I find sexy--except my society trivializes women, kids, animals, mythic creatures, the timid and sensitive and shy... everyone who turns me on. And so my art about their lives must be trivial too. Furry, girly, worthless.

Ask any patriarch.

Oh, I work on my art anyway. Can't surrender to society (or other recurring diseases).

A lebbird, a sentient winged leopard; sketch by Wayan. Click for details.
A lebbird, native to Lyr
Lyr, a huge sea-world; globe by Wayan. Click for details.
Lyr, a huge sea-world
'Slaves Don't Dance' (p.14), a dream-comic by Wayan. Click for details.
Slaves Don't Dance, p.14

First Planetocopia--I'm building a huge sea-world, Lyr. Write the Diomedes tour, adjusting map details...

Next I email some permission-requests to furry artists online whose creatures I used as bases for my illustrations of local peoples and creatures. Not a warrior or butch in the bunch...

Then I work on dream-comics. Color Page 14 of Slaves Don't Dance. Slow, slow, the slowest cartoonist on Earth...

And of course trivial. Don't forget trivial.

THAT NIGHT

Three weird men stalk me. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge

I'm walking slowly up a quiet, winding residential street in the Berkeley hills. Took a bus, now walking the last few blocks to... what? What am I here for? Blank.

Walk three meters behind a girl who keeps taking all the exact same turns I do. Are we going to the same event? I'm too shy to ask her, yet worry I'm scaring her by "following" her silently, though I'm not. Still utterly sure I must go turn here, go that way, turn there. But no idea what our goal is.

Three men are doing the same to me, following me ten feet back. But they're not silent. Talk about "that weird old man".

For blocks, I don't connect this with me. When I do, I feel scared and hurt. Glance at them. They have disturbing auras, especially the leader. (Yes, I sense auras.) I don't know what that color/shape/scent means, but it scares me. I fly to escape three stalkers. But they fly too. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

I start climbing a fence. They follow.

Climb the stone wall of a house. They follow.

At last I summon my dream-strength and kick off into the air, flying clumsily... but flying.

Damn. They can fly too. They follow.

They never attack me, just dogging me, staying ten feet back...

Then... their masks peel away. Their true selves are revealed. Three teenage archeologists. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

They're still male, but younger now. A teenage gang. They carry packs bristling with picks, trowels, brushes, lenses...

Oh, no! They're... Teen Archeologists! I feel a rush of terror. As anyone would.

Then those masks slip. That too was a cover. Their TRUE true selves are...

Not even human. Shapeshifters, just passing. They relax into mere blurs of pure awareness, and tell me, casual and blunt, why they hound me.

"We're guards. We've been monitoring your dreams for years." Their job's to counter a dream entity--a being, or a force?--that's recurred a lot in my dreams, puzzling me. "We contain it. Can't let it go too far!"

Friends or foes? "Toward you? You're not our business. Oh, you dreamers are always projecting fears onto us, see us as stalkers--or guardian angels. All that's just your human drama.

"Irrelevant to us--our business isn't with YOU, but with that entity. We follow you only because it manifests around you. You're open to it." Three formless energy-beings invade my dreams, hunting a fourth.  Sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

In the dream I recalled times I'd met this dream-entity they oppose, and this idea of invasion by the entity (and its three hunters) explains a lot about my recent dreams...

...but when I woke, I forgot what the entity was.

But not how frank they were about it. No Guardians of the Mysteries there! Those guardians don't care what I know. Or not.

I'm not their job.

NOTES IN THE MORNING


Trenchcoat Angels: dream sketch by Wayan.

YEARS LATER

Five years later, I got a longer, clearer interview: Trenchcoat Angels. And the entity they guarded against did seem to be making me sick, though by that time I was fighting back hard on my own. But none of that came clear at the time. I posted this dream for what was clear soon as I woke: the Tri-Guardians themselves said not all dream-figures are internal, or even concern you. A century of dream-theorists, from Freud to the latest sleep researchers, all assume dream figures are just aspects of you, you, wonderful you...

...except shamans. Primitives who naïvely think dreamworlds are real--and that their natives might have their own agendas.

What if the Tri-Guardians told the plain truth?



LISTS AND LINKS: hunted! - nightmares - guards & guardians - flying - Jungian Shadows - masks & disguises - shapeshifters - archeologists - energy beings - dream advice & diagnoses - shamanic dreams - dreams about dreamwork - a similar dream 26 years earlier: The Big Crunch - 5 years later, the three reappear as Trenchcoat Angels - Jo dreams of similar guardians in Backwards Causation & Demon-Summoning is Just a Misdemeanour

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