Glimpses

Her face, beautiful and exotic, draws nearer to mine.  Her eyes are deep and dangerous.  Her luscious, full mouth twists up at one corner to form a sexy, sadistic smile.  She slowly parts my lips with hers and kisses me with the smooth confidence of one who is desired by all.  As she pulls away, her smoldering eyes hold my gaze, her expression saying I am a tasty morsel to be devoured.  I pretend I am unconcerned by the lethal poison burning my lips and the tip of my tongue, though we both know full well her kiss is used to kill.  But that is not her way with me.  We have been enemies for far too long and know each other too well for that.  She intends to kill me using her darlings.  With the grace of a deadly panther, she turns her back on me and moves toward the device.  I calmly wipe the poison away, careful not to swallow.  She places her hand on the console and keys the correct combination.  I walk over to stand beside her.  I can hear rabid snarling and snapping sounds getting closer.  The hell hounds are on their way to maul and rip and tear.  It's what they do best.  After all, she likes to keep them hungry.  We stand side by side and wait in silence.  They're almost here.


Sunlight streams down through the leaves like ribbons of gold.  Lush shrubbery grows amongst the trees around the grove, yielding fat, ripe berries.  Bright flowers rise up above the grass, filling the forest with a sweet smell.  Butterflies flit from flower to flower, alighting on vivid yellows, pinks and blues to drink their life sustaining nectar.  Shimmery, powdery wings dot the clearing in beautiful colored patterns, large and small.  The insects begin to gather together in small groups, bouncing up and down in the air with each beat of their delicate wings.  The patches of butterflies glide to the center of the clearing where the sunbeams are thickest and brightest.  They move together like leaves blown by the same wind, swirling peacefully around each other until they have formed a fantastical column of ever-changing color.  The column condenses and the figure of a pale woman robed in light, airy fabric straightens up and sweeps her gaze across the grove.  Her eyes settle on a human standing silently, breathlessly at the edge of the trees.  She smiles gently, mouths something, and bursts out in all directions in a mass of color and fluttering wings. 


Sandy bent over to get a better look at the large monarch butterfly.  It's wings slowly and elegantly folded and unfolded, showing off a dazzling stained glass pattern of orange, black, and white.  As she got closer, Sandy noticed what the monarch was standing on.  It had delicately attached itself to what was left of the rotting carcass of a squirrel, sharing the space gleefully with the flies that were attracted to the sharp stench of decay.  Sandy swatted at the insect, scaring it away from its perch.  "Nasty little bastards," she muttered, straightening up.  She looked back over her shoulder as she continued along the paved path winding around the lake.  The monarch had reattached itself to it's treasure, proudly reigning over the stinking, rotted remains. 

Dreaming: Exploring

I know I am in the Alaskan rain forest, though it looks more like a rain forest in the tropics.  I am sitting on a large boulder at the edge of a large pool.  A young male tiger lays on a rock next to and below mine.  I lean down to pet him, and although he is wild, I know he will not attack.  Beautiful, lush, greenery spreads out behind my perch for miles and miles.  The pool in front of me is crystal clear and light blue.  A cliff rises up from the pool to my left, it's top leaning out over the water with a tall natural column of rock jutting up from the pool to meet the cliff's top, making a gorgeous tunnel filled with water from the pool.  I am on the opposite bank of the pool than I was before, walking down a gentle, grass covered slope that leads out of the rain forest.  I step down onto a wide cobbled side street in a place that resembles an Italian town.  The stone under my feet is a light tan color and the buildings are mostly made of stone or bricks of varying shades of tan, light brown, and rusty browns.  The roofs are made of baked clay shingles.  I am a stranger in this land and I know no one, but I am not afraid.  I look forward to the adventure of exploring this place and living a whole new life.  I walk into a building and step down into a bustling mexican restaurant.  I pass by people who look hispanic and indian by turns.  Dark skin, dark hair.  A handsome young man smiles at me as I pass by.  I walk out into a narrow alleyway onto another cobbled street.  The sun has almost set, making the tan street glow with the sun's evening warmth.  I explore the town, walking past the people who live there and taking in the amazing architecture around me and reveling in the atmosphere of the place.  When night falls, I am still walking around outside on the lit streets.  I pass under a cobbled tunnel and notice I am being followed by a man.  I feel uneasy at first, and I stop and half-turn to reveal that I know he is there, to confront him.  Then I realize I know this person.  He falls into step with me and we begin talking.  The conversation flows easy and insignificant.  Suddenly the man turns to me, takes my chin in his hand, and kisses me firmly and quickly on the mouth.  He looks into my eyes with a slightly pained expression and says "So many words and nothing to say."  He lets his hand drop from my face and rushes off into the night.  I could follow him, but I have a boyfriend back where I am from.  I smile and continue walking along the festively lit streets, happy that it happened even if nothing would come of it. 

Dreaming: The Insane Asylum

There has been a mistake.  My boyfriend of three years was sent to a prison/insane asylum but he's really not crazy.  I fake it and pretend I'm crazy so that they will institutionalize me too.  I know without an ounce of doubt that I'd rather be trapped in the asylum with him than be free in the world knowing he's in there.  The prison is in the countryside in a field.  There is a forest around the perimeter.  The grass is golden, so it's probably fall.  The grass is trampled in many places from the prisoners and their guard so that the dirt is predominant in some places.  He is already in his cell when I arrive.  His cell is a large boxlike enclosure with padded air flooring like it was an air matress.  Half of it is just filled up, so the top half is where he stays.  Since only half of the enclosure is empty space, he has to sit and crawl, not stand and walk.  The prison is open and is like an amusement park for some gawkers.  They go to look at him because some of his cell is plexiglass and he can't go anywhere inside it and truly escape their watching.  I am waiting in line with the rest of the convicted and insane.  I am told by a fat, slightly ugly, women warden that males and females are not housed together.  I am devastated.  I absolutely would not subject myself to this hell unless I was with him.  That was the whole point.  I reason with her and the portly man beside her, who is her superior, until he says he will put me in with my boyfriend for now but can't guarantee anything.  I am unsettled but fairly happy for the moment.  I just need enough time to prove to them all that he isn't crazy and neither am I.  I go through the icecream and hot dog lunch line, which is out in the open field too.  I am finally put in the cell with my boyfriend.  We speak to each other and try to deal with crawling on the airmattress floor and dealing with the starers.  We feel like monkeys at the zoo.  Don't these people have any decency?  Why do they stare so and press their faces up against the glass and point?  We are sane and we are innocent!  Since I am new to the prison camp, I get to meet with my appraiser.  She judges whether I am crazy or not.  She stands me next to two other people, one of which is a young black boy.  She asks us each a question, only one, and they are each extremely different and unrelated trivia questions.  If we get the question right, we are free, if not, we go back to the cells.  The boy gets an extremely easy question that anyone over the age of 4 could get.  I am confident I can answer mine.  When she gets to me, it's a very obscure history/geography question that I don't expect anyone to know.  I get it wrong and there are no other changes, no more questions.  It's so unfair!  I am sane!  Can't she see that I'm not crazy!  I tell her the situation, my story.  She listens politely but with the air of someone who will not change her mind.  She apologizes and says one question is all I get, but she will be back to ask another one in three months time.  Three months!  I can't wait that long!  My first year of college is starting and I don't want to miss my classes and miss being in the MV's because I was wrongly convicted of lunacy!  My boyfriend is also going to the same college and he can't miss it!  I plead with her but the woman won't budge.  When she leaves, I run back inside and find my confiscated cell phone and try to dial mom's cell phone number for help.  I was told that an adult guardian can come and sign me off and get me out.  If only mom knew where I was and that I needed out, she could come get me and my boyfriend out by bringing his mother with her.  I can't dial the right number.  The woman will be back any moment.  I'm almost in tears because of fear and frustration.  I keep hitting the wrong buttons.  I dread that this will be like so many other dreams where the dreamer can't run away, etc and fails an easy thing.  But no, this is different.  I get a hold of mom and tell her to come get us.  She agrees and I relax, knowing we will both be free soon. Throughout my time there it bothers me that the insane are treated so poorly, but I'm preoccupied with getting us out and separating myself from the truly crazy in the warden's minds that I push the issue to the back of my mind, but I wish they could be helped to get away too.

Dreaming-A Nonsensical Telling

A virtual world, a game.  A tall, somewhat plain but handsome, sturdy man walks by my side, showing me the amazing things he has there.  He didn't make it from scratch, his uncle's money bought it.  I find that it's cheating and takes away, but I don't say that.  It puts my homemade world to shame, but I am not bothered by that.  I wonder at the real feel of plastic tarp beneath my feet when I twist my bare foot around on a circle of it.  I hold my hands out under a water fountain and marvel that I feel it like it were real-wet and cold, streaming over my skin.  He likes me, this man.  He is older than me by a few years, a man to my young woman.  I don't quite return the feeling.  I am wild and free and unsure, he is sturdy and steady and knows exactly what he wants.  He talks to me, trying to bring me in with his kindness and reliability.  There is a war.  He runs through the jungle with a gun alongside the rest of his crew.  He walks into a large, wooden, two story house in the forest of some foreign country.  It is a trap.  They will all die.  There are suicide bombers inside, waiting for them to move far enough into the rooms that they cannot escape when the blast goes off.  Run, run, I feel in my heart as I watch from a 3rd person camera perspective.  I warn him with the fiber of my being.  He catches it.  He looks under the bed and sees a handsome, tanned faced young man of twenty something looking out cruelly from his hiding place.  Before the dark haired young man can speak, I warn with my heart again.  If he lingers, they will die.  My man runs and leaps out the second story window and his crew, one lean black man and one short, pretty woman, follow him instantly.  The building explodes but they are already on their way to the ground.  They are hurt by the fall, but nothing serious.  This has happened before.  They died.  I didn't want him to die.  I wasn't sure if I wanted a future with him.  I knew I didn't want to lose such a good man, though, regardless.  The world needed a man like him.  He deserved to live.  This was a second chance and fate changed and they lived, but his arm below the elbow was blown off.  He comes back to me, as good and cheerful and steadfast as ever despite his missing arm.  He sits down in front of me, resting between my legs.  Both of us are sitting upright and he faces away from me.  Two of my exes are sitting near me.  One is hostile, the other indifferent.  I don't care about the hostility.  It doesn't make me stop touching the man.  I rake my nails gently back and forth on his back outside of his shirt.  As I stare at his back and watch it move slowly with his breathing, I feel his goodness and I see a flash of the future, of his true, certain, unwavering desire.  He knows what he wants absolutely.  Before me is a man who knows where he wants to take his future.  Next to me, in my exes, are boys who are still just boys.  I see me as his wife, wearing an apron, long dirty blond hair that looks similar to his buzz cut dirty blond, welcoming him home through a white door.  We have a young son.  He is much loved by his parents.   The man in front of me is happy.  He doesn't know of my uncertainty.  Later, he gives me a silver ring with a yellow-green gem as a gift.  I take it and am pleased by it's beauty.  I misunderstood it's meaning.  It is an engagement ring, my grandmother aunt tells me by saying "It's all right, he's always wanted you."  It is true.  Ever since I was years younger, when he was still a man at heart and I was even more wild and uncertain, he has wanted to marry me.  I don't know.  I don't know.  The idea excites me and niggles at me, forcing me to face my uncertainty.  I wake up.  I don't want it to end.  I want to know what happens between us and to the man himself.  I go back to sleep.  I go to him and decide I would be a fool to let him go.  His future vision comes true.  I accept him and we marry and are very happy.  I come to love him as he has always loved me.  We have a son.  I love them all.  I wake up.  I am happy and hold on to the feeling and events of the dream.  




I often have weird, wonderful dreams that I don't want to leave but are very hard to remember or are nearly impossible to tell in a coherent way to someone else.  So much in dreams you just KNOW without any logical reason why you know it.  So much is felt without any kind of back story.  I love my dreams.  I wish I could video record them because, before writing this, I believed I could never record it in words or by telling it to someone else.  But, whether this dream I have written makes sense or not to others, it makes perfect sense to me and it really did a great job at capturing the feelings and the stream of consciousness of the dream.  I can feel and see more than a reader who didn't have the dream can from reading this, but the words call back those things that can't quite be written down to me.  I like this and I think I will try it again with no regard to coherence.  It's very fun and true to the dreaming!  There might even be ideas for stories or something hidden in them.

God Is In Us

I recently went to Wild and Wonderful West Virginia to go on a canopy zipline tour with Mom, her friend Monica, and Monica's husband Timmy.  I went on a zipline for the first time and rappelled at the end and went with Timmy on an exhilarating and slightly frightening motorcycle ride.  After the tour, we went to a large river where people often go white water rafting.  We made our way through the trees and between large rocks, jumping from one to the other like forest spirits.  Once at the water's edge, I turned away from the river and looked back into the trees.  There were large boulders amongst the trees and some trees grew on top of the rocks.  Water ran over and around the rocks and trees, finding new paths down the hill mountainside and to the river.  I went to sit on a large stone at the bottom of all the little waterfalls and took in the splendor.  I heard God's voice there, through my soul.  He said:


I am in the rock.  I am in the trees.  I am in the water.  I am in you.  I am in them.  I am the tree that takes root and grows in the most impossible places.  I am the water that finds a different path, or, when there is none, makes its own, always moving certainly along its course.  I am the Light of the World and I also reside in the shadows cast upon the way. 


Shadows from limbs and leaves overhead crisscrossed my arms with their shadowed pattern and I felt God in everything in me and around me.  I find that I am closer to God when I am in nature, feeling His presence in everything and everyone.  He truly is everywhere and I feel that saying Amen shouldn't be a dismissal of a conversation with God, but should rather be an acknowledgment of His continuing presence.  The world comes even more alive when I am reminded that it moves and breathes with the Spirit of God.  After I turned back to watch the river, I took to staring at the mountainside along the opposite bank.  Trees thickly covered the mountain and as I stared at the greenery of the millions of leaves, my eyes unfocused while at the same time focusing intently.  The concrete scenery before me turned into swirls of paint and color and feeling.  As the breeze stirred the leaves, I saw the mountain, the trees, nature, breathe, faintly but surely to those who look.  It breathed with God's lungs and served as a testament that He lives.