Dreams of helpful pedestrians and a school for oneironauts
Up for a stroll 05:30 in the old industrial patch near Hastings where I used to live. Just near the big warehouses that double as music studios. I walk towards the sun rising over Grandview.
Lucid? Almost lucid?
A crowd of people run South, up the bicycle path. It's like a cross-section of Vancouver is out jogging this morning.
I turn North. Wow. There's a lot of people here.
I pull one woman aside.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
She turns - close-cropped graying hair and a retroreflective blue-striped tracksuit - a smirk.
"Helping you dream" she says.
And she runs off.
Hermes has been trying to get my acknowledgement, my attention, my respect for some time.
__________________
Imagine a jagged mountain shaped like a kolrabi, top and bottom.
It floats, slowly rotating two or more kilometers above the rural valley.
Like a Laputa. But this is no refuge for idle intellectuals. The minds here are honed and their edge tested.
Well, maybe not that honed. I am in slow orbit of its mass, π/12 off the equitorial. Its Higgs Bosons, tilted and skewed off of spacetime by psychic whim, keep it heavy and high off the earth and me, attuned to it with the help of my suit, in freefloat around it. I lost my grip some time ago, likely having blown a test to scale in properly. I can only hope not to make an ass of myself on the way in.
The main equitorial dock rotates into view. And oblong rectangle and much more
Okay. Adjust my descent. I twist my mass a few degrees, but I'm not skilled, not powerful enough to make it. I'm going scrape hard, then slip out of orbit. It's a long way down to the Earth - or more likely, and worse, it's a public rescue. Not a fall, but a fail.
Rotate the mass of the pod and slip the aft into the Earth's well 10% and invert the spacetimeplane on the reverse. θ -> π/12? I think. My teacher thinks. She thinks in my head. I think in her head.
We think.
And the sixty or so students within do that. Their/our applied subjectivity gently nudges our mass-existence onto the slope of the Earth's gravity well on one side and away from the other. The structure, tugged by the Earth, tilts. Mass shifts. I float/coast/freefall...
...through the dock. And inside. Uninjured.
It's like Giger took up interior decoration. It's like termites ran Ikea. It's alive, sort of. Not like us. Obediant yet terrifyingly dominant. Smooth. Peanut coloured, pea, and muted saffron. Rounded, arched, rippled. Translucent lights added with orthodox electrics powered by repurposed digestive acids. Beautiful.
I float across and into the main classroom, rotating on my back and looking "ahead" through my shaggy brown hair and over my nose-ring. I coast down, and gently pitch until I land on the foot-high radial ripples that are our chairs, our benches. I catch my breath.
My instructor, our psychic queen in her heavy diving suit, smiles.
Well done. She thinks, and turns to the class.
What? Oh. Was that the test? Is she pleased. I slipped off. I fucked up the climb. Was that a set-up? Or just an obvious consequence of my behaviour that she foresaw and... used?
My mark is solid. I am in the top tier. There is another like me. I catch a glimpse of her. Like the rest of our class our uniforms are beetle-like; leathery, chitenously armoured and symbiotic. Tendons for strength-amplification and gas-cycling lumps that keep us alive and tethered to the psychic mass. We are perfection in utero.
"You are going to be going into the deep unconscious" she speak not with her cortex but with her larynx, as she does when she means business.
Oh. This is the final exam. Right.
"You will be walking around the world. In the dark. For about three weeks. You will be facing the deep subconscious fears projected from one of your classmates."
I've heard of this. This is what separates the children from the women.
"This is a 3 out of 13 on difficulty. Pack food. Team up."
And a tent. Something to bound your space and shield your subjectivity from that monstrously infinite holy blackness.
Also - the scale actually goes from 1 to 13 and then over from 1 to 3 again in the "lethal to all" super-range.
We're babies at this.
And yeah. I'm scared.
I catch her eye quickly. Not the teacher-queen; the other one like me. Except she is pale and black-haired, with black-framed rectangle glasses. Fifteen years old. Picture Homura. But I know her in waking life. This is Brook, just under different circumstances. Eyes brush past. We know. We are among the best of grades but we are not social alphas. We learn because we love it. And we do not want to stand in the alphas' way. We let the social acknowledgment of peership fall slack and turn away.
But her and I on a team? Unstoppable. Or at least optimal. Not really fair to everyone else though. We should take along someone who is struggling. Not someone who fails because she makes trouble. Just someone who is a bit behind. I mean, how else would this be fair? Or a proper challenge?
And, another question seemingly unrelated - whose fears will be actualized in that dark place?
Ah. Of course. To keep it fair.
No.
Our Queen doesn't believe in fair. To keep it a challenge.
It will be one of us. Her or me.
Is it "Challenge Accepted?"
Damn the alarm clock. That was just getting good.
Consider. The offer of dream-help.
Consider: Watching "Hearts of Darkness." About the making of Apocalypse Now.
Watching Coppola talk about growing by facing your fears by becoming them, then moving past. Watching how messed up US/Vietnam-war films are, and how incredibly colonialist just-short-of-hate-speech the source text is. My fear of being a bad person. Of being thought a bad person. Facing that. A recent incident that prompted two earlier posts is the penultimate exam. Facing that. Coming out better, one hopes. Still facing that. To be thought is to become? No, too weak. I'll need to do something more direct. This is going to take awhile.
Consider:
What lacked in my life that I struggle to make up for?
Body/identity integrity. Ostracized. Bored.
This by contrast: Gender integration. Included by those who matter. Engaged, eager and challenged.
Consider:
Night-terror-like spatial distortions in closing my eyes under the effects of Wellbutrin
Consider:
Eleanor Lamb. Emma Frost. Homura Akemi and Sakaya Miki. Psychonauts
I really missed having a media-archetype-saturated science-fiction dream
Consider:
Dreams of acrobatics in lunar G
Dreams of trying to find gender euphoria in adolescence that were interrupted by waking, much like this one, because I was on the wrong track. Am I know in this residual pining? If so, how? Detect and fix. The solution is in fear. In becoming it.