The strangest part of the dream last night was .. well, there were a lot of strange parts. A girl around 20 and I become friends. She says to me I look slutty because I put on mascara. I said, when you get to be 40, you have to, when you’re young and gorgeous like you, men chase you around like cartoons of floating dogs and you don’t need to do anything. I looked at her and it was true, she was absolutely stunning to look at. She said “I like you!” I liked her, too, and then we were friends and I thought maybe I would have a positive influence in her life.
In another part of the dream there was some kind of scuffle and shake up in a group, I think the Scotsman may have been among them. A woman had seen a crab escape from the room. He had gotten into the hotel and she had stepped on one of its legs in an effort to stop it. You could see the leg there, some fleshy part hanging out of the broken shell. It was disgusting. The Scotsman went running after it, into the halls of the hotel, which was the sort you imagine existing in a place like Jamaica, everything open to breezes with slatted white walls.
The woman had hurt her foot, stepping on the thing, and now she felt that a demon in the crab had gotten into her. Another girl in the group, with whom I was staying, got with her on a bench and they started pouring and splashing some kind of dark liquid on the woman’s face while the woman knelt on the floor in front of the bench increasingly agitated in belting out some unintelligible incantation at the demon.
I sat next to the other girl on the bench who had brought the supplies, as a helpless supporter. I thought the supplies were mostly culinary in nature, like hot sauce or something. Then, sure enough, a shimmering disembodied devil – vague looking, because he was shimmering like steam, but red and wrinkly and horned – emerged out of the face of the shouting, keeling, writhing woman.
And, I thought to myself, cynicism gone. I have seen a shimmering devil evaporate out of the skin of a woman.
Just as suddenly, I felt a kind of bubble of energy enter my hand and I knew it had gone into me. Everyone had gone off to do their own thing and I thought, I need someone to help me now. I don’t know how to do that ritual. It felt urgent and real, I think, in the dream….
The kitties woke me up then, for a brief moment, and I reminded myself that it wasn’t urgent and it wasn’t real. I lay awake listening to the echo of what the woman had been saying in her incantations, and I reflected… there was something about the way she phrased it (unfortunately I can’t remember now) but something about it was expressly sexual and reminded me of that thing I thought of years ago when I was young, of the idea that the devil gets put into you, and left there, and you carry him around. You contract him like an infection. And then you become like him.
After going back to sleep, I lived in a marvelous apartment with two swimming pools out on a huge patio. It was in a high rise hotel and the two swimming pools glittered against the sky, overlooking the city. Now I was living in the apartment of a friend of mine whose mother had died. We were all in school and went to graduation and at the graduation the principle or dean or whomever, said she wanted to read the eulogy.
My friend didn’t want her to, and I thought it was strange that our graduation was co-opted like this. I went to stand by her and she tried not to cry and I also tried, especially for her sake. I managed it by focusing on the humor in the situation, the humor in life. I looked around the room and thought about how funny it was, and so I managed to stay somewhere in a balanced tension between trying not to laugh and trying not to cry, with the odd swelling in my nerves moving around my body, from my belly and my cheeks to my eyes and my throat. I kept my knees locked and kept biting my lips to manage the whole affair. It was vivid.
Later, there was a story line to which I cannot remember the connecting thread, or the introductory plot, but I remember a scene in which I was in a (yet another) hotel room with people meant to be my family. They weren’t my real family.. I don’t know what my real relationship was to them. The phone rang and we didn’t answer it. Then we knew that the hotel management, or someone, would next be coming to the door. I meant to hide so they wouldn’t find us and I ducked behind one place. But maybe we weren’t on the same page… not everyone was properly hidden by the time the man got to the door. So we had to stage a scene of some kind. I pretended that we were paranoids afraid of a nuclear holocaust or some kind of natural disaster, and that I was hiding behind the wall out of fear. When the man brought me out into the sunshine I faked astonishment at how nice the sand was and how safe.
There was so much more to the dream. It’s astonishing how much one can dream in one night, and remember, and not quite remember but know one has dreamed (for example I know there was another story line about the highrise hotel, where I had some kind of interaction with a man and I was telling him about the swimming pools, and that one chat with the beautiful 20 year old where she said “I like you!” wasn’t all there was to it), while other nights one cannot find even the faintest scrap of dream – not even one image left – on waking.
