Dream Log: December 22, 2001

I thought I was raging to be free, but really it was something else, words and numbers and feelings inside me. they showed me visions. they said that I was their prison. that I am a chain on an angel who could sing to the heart of the world. the language of nothingness, the black-rimmed sun, like the dying petals of a lily. a lily in his hand for no reason.

I met my parents in the recesses of an infinite library, like Borges' brain, expanding on the fuel of phrases forever. I watched their outlines glimmer. all the colour faded from within their outlines, draining into the floor. they stayed still, like ice sculptures, empty. I saw how happy they'd be that way: clear and quiet, everything about them forgotten and at peace. the contours of their faces, their hands: a map of everything that was ever important.

in another dream, I was reading fire from yellow pages, my mind translucent, waiting for inspiration, a spider in a rain-bright web. the crows on the sunset-shadowed roof. the burning petals of a yellow rose. lonely for friends' voices, an unknown home, woodsmoke in the trees. hallucinogenic bluebells and pinkbells rippling through the undergrowth. running through tilted dreams of sky islands.

• Walking along an avenue with two friends, we come to an auto mechanic's place of business. Sitting upright on a stool inside the garage is a long-haired bearded hippie dressed in robes. His eyes are closed above a serene face, apparently lost in meditation. We walk on down the street towards our destination but my perspective shifts to a third person camera angle focused on the hippie. A narrative voiceover comes in, identifying this man as the Christ. The voice comments on the similarity of Jesus-the-man's methods of becoming Christ-the-god to the methods of other prophets who antedated and succeeded him. The meaning of this statement is illustrated when the man turns slightly away from the camera's sight to take a deep toke from a large glass pipe, then returns to his meditation, seemingly at an even higher vibration than before. The narrator continues: "Like many before and after him, Jesus utilized altered brain chemistry as a springboard for reaching the Divine, partaking of the holy Ganga and Soma plants while traveling the Indian subcontinent in his pre-Messianic life and fasting in the deserts of modern day Israel.

  Back in my own body and without the narrative voice, my friends and I arrive at the house of a marijuana dealer. We wait in his backyard while he finishes his current business. It's a pleasant place growing wild with grass and shaded by fruit trees. Unexpectedly, the dealer and other people in the house come out to the yard and try to grab ahold of me. I escape by levitating about ten feet into the air. The dealer is a good jumper, though, and grasps my feet to pull me down to the ground. I levitate higher, using the height of the telephone wires as a mental lever so that I am out of reach of my antagonists. I float away on the flower-scented wind.