VOW:

I dream I'm on a suburban street across from a mall. I have a huge erection, and I'm chanting an Erection Vow. I chant:

"My Christmas present to me,
my New Year's vow,
is to find an easy-going girlfriend,
no more big dramas and fears,
so I won't get sick from stress.
Someone I love? Ah, what's that mean to me?
I just want to be myself,
show my feelings freely around her,
not stifle them as I did so much with Raven."

CHOP:

But as I stand and vow, I'm holding a huge paper-cutter blade. The old kind, that comes down like a guillotine, not the new safe ones. AND IT'S TEN FEET LONG. While I vow, I've been absent-mindedly slicing up parked cars, and dragging the metal into my car! I plan to take it home and weld it into one new home-made car. Up till now I've felt no guilt about stealing slices off people's cars: "It's just one piece off each, they can spare it." But now that I look at what I'm doing, I pause. Just sliced the end off an ancient pickup, with a wooden truck bed and a cheap fiberglass campershell. Aside from the right tail light (or turn signal?) screwed into the wood, the slice is just a heavy chunk of wood, 150 cm long, maybe 10x10 thick. Nothing more. I'm ripping off poor people--nobody with a funky old car like this can afford to replace a light. I feel guilty and lift the beam and slide it into the back of the truck and slink off with my other 'finds.' From the truck bed I hear a woman's sleepy voice--"Huh, what? Ow!" And then she starts crying! I dumped that piece of lumber on a woman sleeping in her car!

Badly shaken, I scurry to my car to escape before she can see my license plate. As I do, I start to wake up again--and realize that my idle, guilty pausing may have saved me from being a murderer: one or two more slices and I'd have chopped off her head or feet. And yet I didn't even NOTICE I was committing crazy crimes--theft, vandalizing the cars I mutilated, stealing for a car I don't even need, have no skills to build, and which I'm going about in the least practical way imaginable.

I wake up badly shaken.

So my unconscious feels over-entitled, stealing slices of things. What? Dividends, living on investments? I DID use an old guillotine-type papercutter, to trim a booklet I printed for my friend Valerie.

Yeah, I'm making art-gifts again, rather than just being with people I like. Can't just call her, have to wait till I've made the perfect gift! Obligation-based thinking... thanks mom! You prepared me well for love and life... in 12th-century Japan.

DOOR:

A few days later I go over to my friend Dawn's to draw. Another friend invited us both to an art event called the Anon Salon. She has free tickets. But it starts late, 11 PM. I have my doubts; still have to bike across town to therapy, go to gym, then shop, then meet with Lily, Alder and Bob about house-buying. Busy busy busy. I'll be exhausted.

Bike toward my therapist's office on a new route from Dawn's house. Lower edge of Noe, along Church to the Muni cut, skirt the park. Pass Mission High students getting out. Castro, Duboce Triangle, lower Haight.

Feel a funny sense of mission and expectation, like this route is special. Atop the hill at Scott and Fell I'm waiting for the green light, when a man in a taxi out in the street right beside me opens his door without looking and knocks me into the parked car on the curb side. Gouges my leg. Not bleeding, but it'll be a deep deep bruise. I'm furious and swear at him. He scurries off without a word of apology.

Well, now I can't go to the gym--can barely bike or walk at all. He really doored me!

Strange: now my sense of expectation is discharged. I came here just to meet him here and get doored! "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd." Makes no sense, but it wasn't random. The sense of foreboding and necessity was as clear as it gets--my unconscious knew about this little drama. What, did I bite his leg off in a previous life?

I wobble down the hill and across to my hypnotherapist's office.

In therapy I tell the dream of slicing cars because rich people can afford it, and Shelley says only: "A man was caught this week on Telegraph Hill, slashing tires just because the owners were rich enough to HAVE cars!" Weird.

Bike slowly home, miserable and sore. I'm a little bit in shock I think. It starts to drizzle.

What was that all about? Sure keeps me from going to the Anon Salon and meeting any more women. We can't have that.

No one will believe this, but even then I didn't see the parallel. It was two more days days till I realized, reading the dream, how it resembled my dooring: I absent-mindedly chop cars with a big hinged blade and hurt someone; and four days later an absent-minded man IN a car chops ME with a hinged metal blade. Oh, no, no connection at all...

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