...
Finally. Finally. Finally. Last night I went to damn sleep and got my dreaming sleep in. I got so much of it I can actually remember bits. Not just actually remember them, but able to get back to them when the day distracts me. And not only that but remembering for certain there was much more than I'm remembering just now. That's in the hierarchy. For ages I have to be happy that I at least remember that I dreamed. Usually that, too, melts away to forgotten utterly very quickly.
If they had a pill for this, for remembering dreams, I might even take it.
I was world traveling. At one point I was in Paris. It was night and the people who'd come to greet me were wondering if I should meet Don and Nancy, my old landlords in paradise, who'd decided to do their old age in Paris, because they were so old they needed someone paying attention. Never mind I thought Don was dead and Nancy living with her brother-in-law in Fort Bragg. They had actually fled to Paris to be quit of their crazy family. Dodder together in peace. I was wondering if that would not end up being but another cul-de-sac in my practice, another thing to take me away from my own work too long.
Then I boarded a train. There was a big vat of coffee where you boarded... the caboose. But if there was cream for it, it was hidden, and it was so oily it had a green sheen. Still, when I got in the train proper I was mostly consumed with the desire for coffee. It was a spectacular specimen of a train. The cars didn't seem to narrow between them, and getting through it was almost like walking down the center of a long shopping mall... and it really did have moments where it was like one of those little desert tents that open into veritable stadiums when you open the flap to go in.
I left my stuff in the car you enter after you pass the coffee vat, and headed in to check things out, to find my spot, to get oriented, situated. I saw rooms on one side that seemed to be old fifties-style recreation rooms where you could watch a movie or play cards or pool or Twister or whatever. I saw rooms that didn't make their purpose explicit. The train seemed to widen and narrow according to no logic.
Finally I came to what seemed to be a real train car, like the ones we've seen in old movies a thousand times, and in it was a very friendly and warm bohemian lady, with thick gray hair and pleasingly funny clothes and a chartreuse bead nose stud so big it was approximately a third the size of her whole face. Unacceptable as that sounds, she was very nice so I just endured it. Engaged in happy blather with her for a bit until my urge for coffee got too intense to let me ignore it.
I needed coffee and I needed to go back to the caboose and get my stuff. I'd be back as soon as I got that handled. After lots more weird "train cars" and darker and lighter and wider and narrower passage through them, I came upon one that felt exactly like the spot to get myself a quad breve and settle this titanic craving, but they were closed. I told them please to take pity because my need of it was too extreme and one of them, chic, chic, chic, chic in the extreme, at least as extreme as my need, took me off into a corner and made me my huge four shots of espresso with steamed half and half, some sixteen or even twenny ounces of satiation, and my relief was unspeakable.
I tasted one sip of it and had consumed it entire in that one sip. Still, my gratitude was immense and I continued back for my stuff at the caboose. I don't even know what happened to my stuff, except being given some vague notion of it having been moved forward in the train for me by an attendant. Like when I caught the chicken bus in Guatemala City and couldn't figure out what happened to my bag, with the driver patiently pointing up to indicate someone'd strapped it to the roof. Okay. This is doable. These people know their stuff, and so I headed back up train to go sit with my friend, hoping to find another quad breve I could maybe savor while we blathered.
I didn't. Not a trace of the chic people who'd pitied me on the trip back for my not there stuff. More recreation rooms and dimly perceived areas and finally I come upon my outrageously chartreuse beaded friend engaged in some sort of crafts project with Michael Ruppert. They're at it in there like Richard Dreyfuss and his home tower project, but they're using four sleeping puppies to provide the base for a painted desert dunes scene.
It was near perfect but I told them this was going to turn into one monster abortion when the puppies woke up. Michael began yimmering at me about how wrong I was, that this or that and this that and all these other things was going to make this sculpture into a lasting masterpiece. I'm thinking to myself that he's very mysteriously seemed to forget utterly that puppies are alive and his medium is going to leap up and start frolicking all over his fondest hope any minute. Did he drug them? Was he hoping all his putty and paint would simply smother them into permanent place? Whatever.
I pressed further forward in the train, to the point ahead I'd seen from my first meeting with the chartreuse bead. I'd thought there were many, many cars ahead to explore, but that spot was actually the very end of it. What do you mean the very end of it? I came in the end. No, this is the end, the caboose.
Where's the engine?
At this, the train seemed to be stopped at a station and I went out to confirm this was a, if not the, caboose. Out there I saw big as heck that this was a caboose and as I was confirming it, the train began to recede, to start moving back the way it came. I tried to glom onto the end of it, but was knocked off by the hole into which it was receding being too small for it, bonked me on the head and toes and knocked me back onto stationary nothingness.
Next thing I knew I was boarding at the coffee vat again. This time there were fresh flowers floating in the green sheen and I had a huge mug of cream in my hand. I tried to dip it in the vat to get the right mix of coffee and cream, but it was sliming the narcissus boughs and passion flowers. I was having to pluck the gooey ornaments from the slime.
I finally just dumped my mug of cream into the vat and it did not, of course, turn the whole vat perfect. It was just another mess for me to try to forget on my way to making perfection out of my atmosphere.
...
An hour later, I remember I was talking with my mother on the phone, explaining to her about the things needing done to my house that are no longer optional, and why, and how much, and she was speaking clearly, lucidly, talking as though I were her sane and trusted daughter... which is all odd because she has had a left hemisphere stroke and cannot speak clearly anymore, let alone not blame me for the forces of entropy, and treats me always as though I ought to have developed at least the measure of lucidity my psychotic sister has completely missed attaining.
I mean, you might think I'm weird, but I assure you I am a paragon of probity and clarity, not to mention a big relief, when you put me up next to my mother or sister to gauge.
I used to dream they were trying to kill me whenever it came time for me to have nightmares... but this was a snippet of outright sensible and no strain on my nerves at all. I was talking with my mother as though she's always been just fine and not vexing and ordinarily motherly and my sister was not even mentioned.
That part was in the dreaming before the long stretch of world traveling I've forgotten... the stretch that led up to being met in Paris by strangers who only knew of me because of Nancy and Don....
And I have to consider it because dreams with family in them are about the relative, and the dreams of moving about in the funhouse-like world are about the absolute... about me in those parts of the business of awakening to the tao.
always and any time....
