I dreamed again of the ruinous Buddhist/Benedictine/Mayan monastery in the nonexistent rocky wilderness off High Street in Westwood. It’s been a long time.

Awed visitors meandering through hilltop temples and colonnaded passages came upon apocryphal relics of their own past, worn objects invested with vast emotional weight from childhoods half remembered but never lived. A tyrannosaur-headed throne presiding over a room full of plaster skeletons with windows looking out on stony, forested cliffs. A white-shrouded dining room crowded with old books and toys, the air aglow with dust motes. A corked ceramic bottle in the shape of a precolombian idol, the effervescent drink within a swirl of heady beer and butterscotch liqueur. All of it carrying the atmosphere and reverence of a shrine.

My father walked with me, quietly affirming the truth of these fictional histories, and I thought of giving up worldly pursuits, donning a brown habit like the holy men I’d seen, in order to curate and protect these mysteries from the encroaching world and those who would shatter their significance with questions.

What does it mean that I’m suddenly remembering dreams again? It’s… unsettling.

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A steampunk Delicatessen resistance dream (haven’t had one of these in awhile!).

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A hallucinatory deadhead fantasy dream.

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A dream fragment.

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First, a disclaimer. I used to be all about writing down my dreams. I stopped doing it around when I switched the blog over to WordPress, partly because with the old site design I could separate them out from the rest of the content, inflicting them only on the interested. Actually I could still do that with the new site design, but am lazy. I guess the real reason is that I used to be a much better dreamer. Back in 2004, I actually practiced at it. I kept to a routine, meditation, little mantras before bed, note-taking, memory exercises. These days, I’ve allowed other preoccupations to take over my attention. So basically I just want to say sorry if this is boring, it probably won’t happen again. I just happened to have an interesting dream with some beer and sci fi violence that lent itself well to narration. Thank you. Read on, or not.

PS. I am using a more link, so those of you reading this in syndication are mocked. Read the rest of this entry »

I am making my way through the hauntingly familiar streets of a South American city. There are landmarks I remember: street corners, alleys, shortcuts I know I have taken before, though perhaps I can’t recall in what order they ought to come or where they lead. But I have been here before. It isn’t just a feeling. I know I’ve been here.

A broad, crowded city square. Spices on the air, the smells of barbecue. Fried plantains served in the peel from a vendor’s cart. Uneven cobblestones. There is a breeze, a sense of open water nearby, a cool palate of greys and blues punctuated by the bright colors of people’s clothes. I feel no sense of claustrophobia, yet the buildings and awnings crowd in so close I can’t see the sky.

At the west end of the square is the opera house, a breathtaking, intricate marriage of baroque and neoclassical styles. Staggered clusters of pillars, three-tiered and set with alcoves where larger-than-life marble figures in robes lounge together discussing philosophy and art like the figures of Raphael’s _School of Athens_. I lean over the rail at the edge of the curb and stare at them for a long time, astonished, more moved than I have every been by anything in the Old World. What a pompous idiot you’d have to be to criticize this place as the product of crass colonial aspirations. There is more earnestness in this facade than in that of the Coliseum.

But I stir. My attention wanders, and I follow it. There is so much more here, all so different, new. I am so glad to be back.

My cousin Luke lives in this city. His apartment is only a few blocks away, on the tenth floor of a high-rise overlooking a strangely monastic tropical garden. Moss everywhere. Weeping willows. A plaque, bearing a dedication describing the rigors undergone and good works achieved by students attending a convent school in Peru. A peaceful place, especially at dusk, with the warm light from the windows of Luke’s building trickling from above. He lives alone, in a narrow, ascetic room with his bed built into the wall behind a lightweight cotton curtain. I was there last night; I slept on his floor. Now I am trying to find my way back.

Instead I take a right, a left and a right and find myself in a cul-de-sac among the back streets of the city’s Little Tokyo. An asian dude in a black running suit gives me a suspicious look as I make my way past his posse towards a spiral staircase, vaguely recalling a shortcut somewhere above opening onto Luke’s street. But as I lose myself among the cloudy veils of laundry lines and sharp looks from old ladies on balconies, I begin to have my doubts.

Suddenly I hear my sisters calling from below. “Hey, Boon! What are you doing up there? How did you get all the way over here in Little Tokyo? We’ve been waiting for you!”

Sheepishly, I begin to make my way down again.

I never make it, but awake instead.

Erin and I and some of our friends pull off a desert highway into a small, dusty parking lot. Above us, beyond an embankment overgrown with sage, a tower looms: an iron scaffold red with rust, with a stairwell spiraling inside it. We are piling out of the car, stretching and preparing ourselves for the ascent, when a thin young man with sandy hair and a windburned face approaches us. He welcomes us and inquires after our drive in such a way as to encroach upon the boundaries of our personal space.

But then he is backing away, moving on to the next car. He must be some kind of greeter. So I shrug off my unease, collect my cane from the back seat and lead the way up the embankment to the tower.

The stairs are rickety, skeletal, shifting and creaking in the dry wind. The desert surroundings, washed out by the sun, share their palette with grimy, moss-covered sandstone. Those we pass keep a tight grip on the railings. They all seem to have lost something in the course of the ascent, dropped it over the side or lost it through the gaps between the steps. They ask us if we’ve seen any of these lost items. We haven’t, which is odd. Unless someone is collecting them up and ferreting them away after they fall.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought my cane. I try to remember whether I locked the car.

At the next landing, five or six stories up, I lean out over the rail. Below me the sandy-haired young man is tampering with the driver’s side door of the car next to ours. “Hey,” I shout. “Stop that!” The young man looks up.

The wind rises. The tower rattles and begins to shake. From somewhere above us comes the creak of shifting metal. A section of iron scaffolding tumbles past us toward the ground. The whole structure is coming apart.

“Down the stairs. Back down the stairs, quick!”

The tower lurches under our weight as we turn and rush back the way we came. In my hurry the cane flies out of my hands and slips through a gap. I can hear it clang and ping against the metal as it falls. Giant pieces of the tower dislodge themselves all around us. The sky opens above. Each time we round another flight and glimpse the parking lot, the sandy-haired young man remains frozen in place, gazing up, his arms at his sides, while around him the other tourists are piling into their cars and pulling away.

The wind and vibrations cease the moment we set foot on the solid concrete of the tower’s foundation. In fact there isn’t even any wreckage on the ground. The tower is intact. Nobody else seems to notice. They’re all still fleeing for their cars.

I turn back, look around the base of the tower for my cane. I discover the entrance to a hidden room underneath the stairs. Inside I find not just my cane, but a half-dozen others, as well as umbrellas, handbags, sets of keys. I stoop and enter the room, reaching for my cane. There are footsteps on the stairs. The sandy-haired man blocks my path. His expression and stance make it clear he has no intention of allowing me to leave.

The kleptomaniacal magician closes; we circle. A shadow crosses his face; when he emerges he has changed and grown into an enormous, shaved-bald mongoloid man, proportioned like a professional wrestler. His immense hands flex eagerly.

I flip the cane in the air, catch it again by its slender black shaft, the better to make use of the knotty head as a club. As I do so, I realize a transition has occurred in my own physical form: I am completely comfortable and unsurprised to discover that I have become Erin Hoffman: an agile little woman with a long, whiplike ponytail, a hard, faintly amused expression and a waist-length black cape.

The mongol lunges; Erin whirls out of his path and backhands him across the face with the head of the cane. He stumbles, then recovers, comes at her again. There is a dull thud as her next blow catches him square in the temple. He stands immoble, seeming to stare off between the gaps in the iron scaffold at the desert sun. The cane blurs in the air, thumps into his skull a third time, and he topples backwards into the sand.

It is the last day of a week-long Bordewieck family reunion. The illusion of our own little utopian commune is fading. Everyone is packing up reluctantly to head back to the real world.

I propose a last distraction: an afternoon hike into the hills. Lisi and Sara and I walk in the lead, my father and Udi behind, everyone else straggling along at their own pace. It’s hot; fern and blueberry bake in the sun along the trail, filling the air with heavy, tangy sweetness. The light washes out colors; pupils narrow down to pinpricks. Lisi’s curls gleam like a halo. My walking stick is slick with moisture from my palms.

After a mile, slabs of red-brown standstone begin to emerge from the brush of the hillside. I point out whitish scorings in the faces of the slabs: lines and circles of unknown meaning, appearing more and more frequently as we progress. “Petroglyphs.”

We turn left onto a side trail, ascending steeply now. Beads of sweat roll down my temples. Lisi and I pause to debate the nature of a peculiar set of glyphs; I recognize them as recent forgeries: four English words inscribed in a tall, narrow mirror script. I have walked this way before; a vague memory of the astonishing profundities that lie ahead is only beginning to arise in my thoughts–yet I know implicitly, the moment I set eyes on this particular stone, that the strange array of inscriptions to be found in these woods is representative of a phenomenon unheard-of anywhere else upon this continent–a seat of ancient North American learning and culture continuously occupied since before the era of the conquerors. Lisi is understandably incredulous. But a gasp and an exclamation from Udi and Sara interrupt our argument.

On the trail ahead of us is a hulking, weedgrown structure of adobe and standstone, like an Anasazi ruin lifted from the deserts of the southwest. Awed, disbelieving, yet half-remembering, I lead the way forward, through a long, arched corridor, open on one side to shadowed woods scattered with boulders.

A doorway opens in the left wall. Beyond it, a stairway leads steeply down into a dim, high-ceilinged room like the nave of a Spanish missionary church. At the foot of the stairs, the room is a ruin; the stone walls are bare; drifts of dead leaves cover the floor. But the sounds of muffled, distant conversation pull my attention to the right. Through another entryway I can see into a larger room, furnished in thick persian rugs and woven tapestries, where craggy-faced, raven-haired gentlemen in comfortable clothing lounge in upholstered armchairs, discussing esoterica in muted tones. Parchment-colored light filters down through lofty windows. And beyond this quiet study, I can glimpse a room wider and brighter still–a room dominated by books.

I turn to my family, who stand dumbstruck around me. “This,” I tell them, “is the Library of the Wampanoags”.

Like a tour guide, I show them single-file through the study and into the stacks. Wonderful, ancient, moth-nibbled books overflow the three-story shelving, drifting into immense heaps across tables, bins and floor. Every book is bound in cloth or leather, yellows, browns and muted reds–there is not a single work here less than twenty years old. The aisles and tables are fairly crowded with the strangest array of researchers; dusty miners, trappers, native men and women of clear eyes and inscrutable expressions. The air is full of the soft buzz of whispers, pages turning, pens and pencils scratching paper. We receive strange looks, some curious, some hostile.

I realize our time here is limited; I lose interest in the tour, let the others wander off to browse. There was a book I found, the last time I was here–a book no other library I’ve ever found has carried. I had never expected to see this place again. I had nearly forgotten it. And that book–well, if I could only have ten minutes to skim through its pages…

Alas, I am allowed no such chance. A frontiersman beside me snarls and grabs my arm; he draws a revolver. My gaze tracks frantically across the shelves, but already they are falling away, fading, washing out with light.

I awake.

Myself, my cousins, friends and others fall into Lord of the Flies tribalism when we find ourselves adrift at sea in a ramshackle three-masted corsair. We scavenge the ship for weapons, supplies, caches of cigarettes and alcohol. Those first aboard, among them John and Nick Manseau, are the dominant clique: those who managed to get their hands on the AK-47s. They mostly fire the guns in the air for effect, especially since the ship is so damn rickety a good double-row of .30 caliber holes in the hull might just be enough to snap the whole thing down the middle.

After a good half-hour of fleeing from the guns like monkeys with our heads cut off, I figure this out. I make my way down through the holds, encountering pockets where other refugees have already gone into hiding. The pirates appear to have targeted a lot of cruise ships in the seventies, as mostly everything down here is in the vein of yellow polka-dotted canvas suitcases covered in mildew. In a cache beneath a false floorboard beneath the very prow of the ship, however, I discover somebody’s hoard: several dozen oversized kitchen knives, a couple of utility razors, a crowbar and a couple of bottles of Bass ale. I choose one of the razors and a heavy, serrated bread knife. I of course lay claim to the beer, but distribute the rest of the weapons among my fellow stowaways.

Possessed of a newfound self-assurance and disregard for my armed enemies, I am soon to be found lounging in a cargo sling dangling from the yardarm, an empty beer bottle cradled in my lap, trying to pry the cap off a second bottle with the blade of the razor. John and Nick and their crew stand around on deck, guns against their shoulders, cursing me roundly.

Alas, when I get the second bottle open I find it has been compromised by age and sea, full of foamy white mold.

My shiv-toting compatriots arrive from below decks; a brief battle ensues. I tumble from the comfort of my hammock for fear of flying bullets, and barely manage to save myself from the waves by grabbing onto an open porthole as I plummet past the hull. The breadknife and the last of the beer tumble out of my lap and disappear with a splash. I duck through the porthole, back into the safety of the hold.

Above the sporadic sounds of gunfire choke to a stuttering halt; either the mutinous assault has been subdued, or the idiots are finally out of bullets. Either way, the contest is now rather moot. The damage has already been done: the shooting has irrevocably compromised the hull and the hold is filling steadily with froth. The last stragglers of the kitchen-knife clan scramble to salvage what they can of the cargo, then slosh with their spoils across the swiftly tilting deck towards the hatch that leads topside.

I, however, am in need of a weapon to replace the one I lost. I take a deep breath and plunge underwater, heading for the deepest innards of the ship.

Close against the keel, in a broad, low-ceilinged space now gray and murky with the inrushing sea, I take my sweet time, rummaging through more rotten suitcases, piles of spare timber and tackle. The lack of oxygen, the fear of drowning, is only an abstract concern. This is dreaming–here I don’t need air to breathe. Alas, I make no more opportune discoveries. I don’t know what I was hoping for–a nice, compact nine-millimeter would be useless now anyway, soaking wet. I settle on a five-iron from a rust-encroached set of golf clubs, kick free from the flotsam and head back the way I came.

My head breaks the surface back in the forward hold just in time for a wet, rending crack as the rotten wood of the hull tears asunder. Light and sea spill in through the hole and beyond it, I see–

“Land! We’re coming up on land!”

A jagged shoreline of pines, broken up by rocky outcrops, sliding by fast. I grab hold of a trailing rope and swing out onto the hull’s outer surface. Up on deck everyone is shouting and scrambling about pell-mell, wailing about how we’ll be smashed against those rocks. The pines slide away and suddenly there’s a marina in sight on shore not fifty yards away, pristine white pleasure yachts bobbing at anchor, and a crowd of people sitting at some quayside restaurant all standing up and waving. I pitch away my hard-won golf club, get a good grip with both hands on the rope and kick off away from the ship, out over the water. “Swim, you idiots!” I shout, then let go of the rope, plunge in and follow my own advice.

Somebody pulls me out of the water onto the dock. “What the hell’d you do that for?” he asks.

“Are you kidding? That ship is a wreck. It’s going to sink any second.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me.”

I turn, and he’s right. From here the ship looks as though its still on an even keel, moving along at a decent clip despite its lack of sail. The people on deck don’t look happy, though, and even as I watch the ship lurches, the stern lifts up out of the water and the whole thing starts to slide down beneath the surface. People are leaping off like mice.

“See?” I say. “I told you.”