John & Belle Have A Blog: A Savage Place! As Lonely and Enchanted as E'er Was Haunted Neath the Waning Moon by Woman Wailing For Her Demon Lover

I have always been a champion dreamer, just like my sister. Of course, they've usually been nightmares, which accounts for my sister's version of "don't let the bedbugs bite"; starting when she was four or five she'd say "don't dream!" Cheering words. I think the scariest dream I ever had (scariest to me at the time) was when I was 12. In order to save my brother I had to make my way through a crystal-walled maze, open at the top, and filled chest high with cold vomit. Looming over it, twenty feet tall, was an ancient eagle, full of malice: the king of all the birds of prey in the world. Somewhat smaller, but almost worse, was his second-in-command: a giant owl, with pitiless golden eyes as big as cart wheels. During the course of the dream, the owl bit my thumb off, and when I woke up I had a painful red line around it and no sign of how it got there. The final scene of the dream was in a police station, where a number of well-meaning grown-ups were trying to convince me everything was OK now. Over their shoulders I could see the city already ablaze, and the eagle circling slowly over the glow on the inverted rain of ash and cinders, bringing on the destruction that meant the end of the world.

Even when I'm not pregnant I'm always somewhat ill and often spend 12 to 14 hours a a day asleep; you've got to fill up that time somehow. Unfortunately for me, in the past, that has often meant zombies. Lots of zombies. The whites of their eyes gone yellow and jelly-like, the cheap polyester suits they were buried in, the mingled stench of formaldehyde and the grave, shambling, the whole nine yards. And not a functioning weapon in sight! The amount of unloaded or dysfunctional automatic weapons I find lying around -- if I were a guy I'm sure this would be performance anxiety, but you'll have to trust me. This is just honest-to-goodness anxiety about not having guns to defend myself from zombies. I do experience lucid dreaming at times, and then it's like that scene in the Matrix: lots of guns. (Yes, I know, I should be having sex instead. Does seem like a waste of lucid dreaming, I'll admit.) Properly equipped, I can raise hell on some zombies. My analyst convinced me that this was not a good long-term strategy for dealing with the return of the repressed, though.

Yes, strange though it may seem to those living outside NY or the Bay Area, I used to have a real analyst and would go actually lie down on a couch, à la New Yorker cartoon, up to three times a week. It was great. I recommend it to everyone who's got serious mental problems. One of my main goals for the therapy was to stop dreaming about zombies all the time, and it worked! The side effect was that I also stopped having grandiose space-opera dreams, which is too bad, since they were great.

The other night, though, I had a really strange dream. Since it was strongly influenced by Gene Wolfe, I feel justified in telling you all about it. In this dream, I needed to find a way into hell. I was searching an abandoned warehouse where I knew there was a gateway. I was very close; at one point I could smell brimstone and see the flickering orange light, but I couldn't push through. Frustrated, I decided to go outside and summon a pair of demons to help in the search. My uncle was with me (a stipulative, dream uncle), and he cautioned against it very strongly, but I wouldn't listen, and when I started to say the demon's names aloud three times my uncle ran off. Their names were like Doctor Malkus and Thatto. That is, those were the names I remembered on waking up, while at the same time knowing those weren't the names I had called out in the dream. Thatto is short for Thanatos, it would seem.

They appeared at once. The Doctor was tall and thin, with a big black hat and black cloak. He looked very young, even though he was ancient, with a paper-white face and a thick black beard, trimmed short. His teeth were short and round, white in his too-red mouth. His hair was long streamers of black. An ironical person. Thatto, as you may imagine if you know his Wolfean prototype Baldanders, was a giant: morose, with sparse ginger-colored hair and ugly freckles the same shade. At my request, the Doctor transported us to hell. It was superimposed on the real word in such a way that travelling a certain distance in one would move you the same distance and direction in the other. The sky was a roiling mass of orange flame, from horizon to horizon, but the plain was dim for all that. It looked like Mars. There were unimpressive ruins here and there, just low-crumbling walls, and a few scattered plants. The air smelt a bit of sulfur, but mostly just dead and used up, as if it had been put away for a long time.

We walked for a while in silence, and when we passed a little stream I got out a bottle to fill. When it was full, I gave it to the Doctor, saying, "kill all the living organisms in here." He just turned the bottle over in his long hands, shook it a few times, and handed it back. His touch sucked the life out of everything; if we had been walking on Earth he would have left blasted footprints in the grass. As he handed it back, my fingers brushed against his, and I stumbled. I could feel him drain me even in that tiny contact. "That was a bad idea," I said, and he smiled. "And this would be an even worse idea." Saying that, he took me in his arms and kissed me. I fell limp almost at once, but he suported me. It was incredibly pleasant, warmth invading my body, everything becoming dim and drowned out by the rustling of my own blood, everything melting away to sweetness. And underlying all this, the unmistakeable sensation, as if a thousand filaments were being tugged at once, each anchored deep inside me, of my soul being drawn out through my mouth. At last he dropped me, and I fell to the ground. It was soft, like a flowerbed turned over in the morning and left all day, so at evening it has a powdery, grayish layer over the black earth. I couldn't move, could barely breathe, but I was quite happy. The earth smelled delicious. In the dream I thought it was a flowerbed, but I see now it must have been a fresh grave.

My vision changed then, and I watched the scene from above. I could see myself splayed on my side in the dirt, with the Doctor leaning over me, balanced carefully on his heels. Thatto had perched his huge bulk on one of the crumbling walls and was mopping his neck with a handkercheif. "Is she dead then?" he asked. The Doctor had taken a tiny hand mirror out of his pocket and was holding it to my mouth. I looked at it from my superior vantage, more interested in the mirror than whether it would cloud with my breath. It was lovely, with an irregular border of irises and foliage, in the art nouveau style. "No, she's alive," said the Doctor. Thatto grunted. "I thought you wanted her alive for later." "Yes, quite alive," the Doctor went on. "She can even hear us now, can't you, little one?" As he said this he brushed a piece of hair back from my face, and when his fingers touched the center of my forehead I truly lost consciousness, and so woke up in my own bed.

I couldn't go back to sleep for a long time. A frightening dream, certainly, but not altogether bad. In fact...but I never have the same dream twice. And if I could remember the true names, and call them aloud? But that's just a silly thing to think.