22 Dream).

Its nighttime and I’m with a few others on a boat in the middle of a lake. At some point a tall, foreboding figure appears, wearing a coat and a hood, his face lost in the shadows. I know he is here to either kill us or take us away. I fall overboard, backwards and intentionally, submerging myself beneath the water, where I feel safe. I feel guilty about abandoning the others, though I knew if I had stayed I would be unable to help them, and even if I failed there was no sense in all of us being killed or taken.

These justifications do not alleviate my guilt in the least.

Once I make it to shore, I scout at least two buildings — apartment buildings, I believe — looking for the figure, though I cannot recall by what means I tracked him. At some point I am in the snow-covered parking lot in front of one of the buildings, and I see something sticking out of the snow, buried but partially revealed. Pulling it out and holding it in my gands, I find that its one of those plastic masks that fit around the entirety of the head, like a Halloween mask. Its a mask of a Gray alien. As I look down at it, I feel disturbed and confused. As I’m holding it, examining it, a woman drives towards my direction in the parking lot, about to drive passed me. I can see that she’s striving to see what I’m holding, curious regarding what I’ve found, so I hold it up to show her, wanting to share my confusion in a way. As soon as she sees it, however, she averts her eyes, now wide with fear, and continues driving passed me with slightly increased speed.

I know that water, according to Carl Jung, is a symbol for the emotions and the unconscious, so perhaps my falling into the lake is meant to signify my tendency to dissociate during times of high stress. Beneath the water I felt entirely comfortable and safe, which just reinforces the interpretation. Being on the boat and falling off of it may even reference my out-of-body experiences, which tend to occur when I’m stressed, though not always.

Jung would say the figure signifies my shadow, my inner anti-ego. His presence and my fear, along with the potential out of body interpretation, may suggest that he instead signifies the aggressive entity I encountered last time I was down there in that otherworldly place. Or both may be accurate. Regardless as to the nature of my OBEs and the otherworldly environments I fall into, perhaps the entity I encountered actually is a psychological projection — perhaps it is my shadow, in other words.

In any case, trying to track him down on land and pulling that alien mask out of the snow is more difficult for me to interpret. I submerged myself in water, I pulled the mask out of snow, which is to say water’s frosty version: is there a direct association here? And perhaps another association given that the figure had no face, and I later found the alien mask? Maybe the alien mask was itself a reference to the shadow, which by its very nature is “alien” to the ego.

In further contemplating the mask issue, I remember that at some point yesterday, I believe during the drive home from work, I was thinking about masks in the psychological sense. I remembered how a friend of mine back in high school, and a line in a song from the first Shindown CD, spoke about how they don’t wear masks.

I call bullshit. Everyone wears masks.

We cannot see our Origional Face. The masks we show the world (the Jungian persona) and the masks we show ourselves (the Jungian ego) all accentuate certain aspects of the inner self, play down others, and bury other aspects entirely. Every single soul has a vast plurality of masks, a wardrobe of ccountless costumes. They change in accordance with moods or states of consciousness, they change over the course of one’s life, and over the course of one’s lifetimes. Its how we both grow in self understanding (“find ourselves”) and evolve (“make ourselves”). We all evolve at our own pace, but the process is inevitable.

Dreams are always interesting, but sometimes I wish that — assuming that they are indeed messages from the unconscious — they would communicate their meaning more clearly.

Spiders & Insecurity (4/21/22 Dream).

In an earlier part of the dream, I have two pet spiders in a glass tank in a dark room. One of them managed to get loose and scurried under the small table the tank rested upon. I try desperately to find it, mildly worried that it may be poisonous and either bite me or someone else. I appear more concerned that this isn’t its native habitat, however, that it may constitute an invasive species, and that my small error of letting in loose may have grand, far-reaching consequences.

Later, I’m in some building where I apparently work and I see someone come into the vestibule from one of the two doors that lead to the outside. Its Chad, an old coworker, and I find myself focusing on his ear — or rather where his ear should be. In its place is a hole with what appears to be something like a curled up ear inside of it. It makes me think of a Gray alien for some reason.

Chad seems insulted and resistant when I tell him he has to leave. He ignores me, exits the vestibule, and enters the building. I finally grab him, I think by the shirt sleeve, at which point he starts acting weird and dramatic. He falls to the floor, and with my grip still on his sleeve, I drag him across the floor. Hardly any effort on my part is necessary, however, as he uses one hand to slide himself along towards the doors, where I’m taking him, while remaining otherwise motionless.

Once he’s outside, I try to lock both doors in the vestibule that lead outside, but neither will. You could basically push them open with ease. Inside, I ask whether or not those doors ever close and I’m told that they don’t. At that point Connie (an old store manager who I absolutely loathe in real life, and who loathes me just as much) appears at my side, and I lean in as she whispers into my ear, talking shit about someone who works with me, a woman who doesn’t watch over her children, and how it was her children that ruined the doors. At that point, the alarm wakes me up.

Haunting Alien Faces.

Stuck in traffic, waiting for the light to change behind the second (count ’em: second) slow motherfucker I’ve gotten stuck behind on my commute to work today, my eyes catch a parked U-Haul truck a short distance ahead of me and to the left. And on the side of the truck I see one of Their faces.

This happens often. I’m not sure if its because I’m of that artistic mindset that tends to make an everlasting Rorschach test out of the external world as a whole or because I’m simply bat-shit insane, but this happens all the time.

I think I see the face of a Gray alien on someone’s t-shirt and it turns out to be the Punisher logo. I see a Gray alien face in the reflections in the chrome pipes above the urinal every day at work — and I drink java, so I’m there quite often. I see their faces and figures in spills, stains, and shadows, day and night. I meditate in the morning, I see their faces, their eyes, staring back at me too, too close behind my eyes as I strive to maintain focus on the breath.

This time, though, it’s a bit extreme. I can’t un-see it. I keep calling myself crazy, that its not really there, that it makes no sense to be there, but this doesn’t help at all.

Once traffic starts moving, I’m actually thankful for the slow-ass in front of me, and I try to be careful as I go forward so I don’t get too distracted when I take a closer look.

And I look. Closely.

And it is, it actually is a Gray alien displayed on the side of the truck after all. It would appear that I’m no more insane than usual today. Which is nice and all, but why have an alien displayed on the side of a U-Haul? What is the meaning of this?

Better to move your own shit than have aliens abduct them? Return the vehicle in the allotted time or you’ll be caught, probed, prodded, and released?

Desire to move off-planet? Enjoy our new trucks, complete with warp-drive.

The Little Death.

10/99

It was fairly late by the time we got back to her sister’s place, and though I wanted to go home, Anne convinced me to stay. I had no car to drive home with, as she had driven me, and she told me it was too late for driving, anyway. She promised she’d take me back in the morning, and pushed me to call my parents to tell them where I was. I really didn’t want to do so, but I did, just to satisfy her. I ended up waking them up only to tell them what they would’ve assumed anyway: that I wouldn’t be home until probably noon tomorrow.

Anne and I pulled out mattresses from the kid’s room and put them on the floor of the living room for us to sleep on. Her sister, Janice, took the couch by the window, and Shelley went into her room with the creepy green light, along with her friend.

Anne and I lay on the mattress, with her head at my feet, and I looked down at her closed eyes and sighed. There was no way I would be able to get to sleep, thanks to my chronic insomnia. It would be hours if I got so much as a wink at all. My mind couldn’t help but fixate on Shelley and the story her sister had told Anne and I regarding her having dreams about being abducted by aliens, or being freaked out by the face of the standard Gray, or the story Shelly had told me her self about seeing those lights dancing in the night sky outside the balcony where she once lived.

And then there was Anne’s strange, little friend, Ella, who believed she was an alien. Then there was me. Why did Anne tend to attract weirdos like the three of us?

In any case, maybe Anne was right, and there was no way to know for certain whether any of this was real, if the government was covering it up. There seemed to be no sure road to truth, and even if I knew that truth for certain, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she was also correct in declaring that there wasn’t a damn thing I could hope to do about it. The answer, she said, echoing the Dizzy character I’d heard so much about but never met, was to stop thinking and start living, to live in the Here and Now.

”What are you thinking about?” Annie said from the other end of the mattress.

“Nothing,” I told her.

Nothing, nothing. How many times had I myself asked questions like that only to receive the response of “nothing,” knowing full well that it was a blatant fucking lie? How many times had I, myself, given that response, as I had just then, when it was the farthest distance from the truth? How much love, happiness, misery, hate, fantasy and memory, truth and lie, thought and emotion, confusion and enlightenment throughout the course of human history had safely hidden behind the guise of that bloody contradiction of a word, “nothing”?

That’s what she’d been preaching about, though: nothing. No thought. Stop thinking, stop conceptualizing, just sink into feeling, into sensation. And here I was, thinking about thinking about nothing.

I looked back down at her. All the time I’d known her, all that we’d been through, and she was still here with me: just one more relationship that was hard to explain, pin down, or define. One more relationship that, if logic dictates, shouldn’t have lasted. Yet I’d learned long ago that logic isn’t the guiding force in the universe, and if there was any doubt the evidence lay right there at my feet.

“You can come down here and talk,” she said, and so I swung my head to where my feet had been seconds earlier. We both had a cigarette and talked for a long time about things.

As I looked in her eyes, I thought I sensed something — but I told the animalistic fool in me to shut the hell up and to maintain some self control. We put out cigarettes and lay down beside each other, our conversation working it’s way into reminiscing. In the process, we rolled our heads closer to one another, and I was wondering how close I was permitted to get to her. I tried to read her, to ascertain what it was she wanted. In the end I just up and asked if I could kiss her.

“You don’t have to ask,” she said, and I tried to justify my asking, but she cut me off and kissed me instead.

I pulled back after a while and just looked at her and smiled. “Been waiting awhile for this…”

She put her finger to my lips. “Do you always have to talk?”

She didn’t say it in a sweet, sexy voice, either. At least to my ears, it seemed as if she was honestly annoyed. I was a bit confused, because that was one of the things I’d always liked about her: we could hold deep conversations while we were otherwise engaged in doing things to one another. I took the message, though, and I tried to shut my trap.

It was a long time that we played, too, and I got to do the things I hadn’t done in a long time. Then it got more heated. It got more heated than it had ever gotten between her and I, more heated than it had ever gotten between me and anybody. On reflex, I went to say something, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than her finger again went to my lips.

“Just feel. Try to stop thinking and sink into the moment.”

She unzipped my fly and her hand went down. I tried to do as she had instructed, to shut up and stop thinking, and just enjoy it all. I felt a warmth, a comfort, a trust sweep over me that I hadn’t felt since… when had I felt that?

And then I felt something different. Something unprecedented. Something strange, beautiful, wonderful, and ultimately foreign.

“Is this okay?”

The feelings sweeping through me put me in a state of indescribable awe. I shook my head almost violently.

“Yeah,” I said, and took off my clothes.

Any fear regarding what I had just agreed to was annihilated upon my guided entry. I lay back, and she moved atop me like an angel of the god I don’t believe in. It was smooth, warm, and rhythmic.

She was fucking beautiful: adjective. I was fucking beautiful: verb.

It wasn’t long, though, until I knew what I needed. I spoke up and asked her if I might try the top, and when she said okay I apologized like I’d just robbed her of her rightful throne. She insisted it was okay, and seemed to have no aversions. It seemed to be a courageous move on my part, for this was absolutely foreign territory. I tried to go with the flow; grow with the flow. I did the best an amateur can do.

As I was atop her, I closed my eyes. I truly put all my effort into not thinking, just focusing on the feeling. What happened somewhere in the rhythm, somewhere in the electric sweat between her and I, is a kind of thing that had often happened to me: I saw things.

I was soaring above a dark, desert plane at a steady speed, looking down from a bird’s-eye view at the desolate landscape, occasionally spotted with what I assumed might be people far, far below. The vision felt so real, the sense of motion felt so real. It felt as if I was bi-locating, as if I was in two places at once. Looking down upon that dead, desert landscape, I wondered if I had finally lifted from the pessimistic, futile, narcissistic wasteland I’d been stuck in the previous four years. Perhaps what I was seeing was a metaphorical hallucination regarding that.

Had this been all I had really needed — ironically, something I had feared?

“Who are you looking at behind those eyes?”

“No one.”

If I tried to explain what I was seeing in my inner eye, it would just come out total gibberish. Even if I had enough focus to talk in a comprehensible manner, I’d just sound crazy again, and she probably would’ve told me to shut up and sink back into the feeling anyway. Besides, how could I explain how she was obliterating all my preconceived notions regarding sex? That this wasn’t just some primitive, animalistic act? Sure, I knew damned well that it was a primitive ritual carried out by an organism’s most basic impulse — to survive, at least genetically — but I had never believed it when my punk rock friend told me it could also serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience. I never understood Annie when she said that it was her favorite recreational exercise. Yet here I was: I felt the snake rising at the base of my spine and biting my brain, intoxicating me with it’s magickal venom. Every pore of my being was irradiating in this sensual fire.

I had been so wrong. This was nothing like jacking off.

“Focus on me,” she said. I had closed my eyes again, but I opened them now to look down on her beautiful body. I escaped that picture-show behind my eyelids, and gazed upon my amazing companion.

After we went on a while, she grabbed the sides of my body tightly and told me to stop moving in a very sudden, urgent voice. At first, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I done something wrong? Had I hurt her? Was I such a fuck-up that I’d even fucked up fucking? Fuck.

“You’re about to feel a female orgasm.” I will never forget how she said it. I will always admire how blunt she was. “Don’t move.”

It was the most bizarre thing — the way it felt like waves, like ripples, like I had stuck my soul in an ocean. She had hers and then told me to “finish up.” As I did as she had asked, I closed my eyes again and I saw Picasso-like still-lives in my mind’s eye, of lamps and couches and other such things. The images were wonderful, colorful and vivid. If only I could save these pictures in my head to file, I thought. If only I had paints and brushes and a canvas beside me.

“No thought,” she said, as if she could tell that I was glimpsing something in my inner eye. “Just feel.”

Indeed, I had nearly forgotten to practice the art of no thought, so I ceased to speak. I ceased to think in words, even in pictures. As I sped up my rhythm atop and between her, everything within me rushed to a point of silence, into static, to a blissful blur. It was nothing but pure sensation; pure emotion. When I reached climax, she grabbed my sides.

“Stop.”

As I swelled in her, I felt the most awesome thing in all my life. I had thought my nocturnal habits of taking matters into my own hands had brought me to orgasm, but it was nothing. It was truly a foreign experience until that night. I dispersed into everything. I was pure energy. I permeated the universe; the universe permeated me. I was at peace with everything. I was the universe.

I made noises beyond my control. She made the noises of a pleased, intrigued girl.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

I think I had this look of amazement, of shock, of total confusion stuck on my face. What the hell had just happened? I could, like, have that every day? Is this what normal people experienced on a routine basis — was sex supposed to be like this? Is it this cool because this is the first time I’ve ever experienced it? That I waited two decades? Is it because I’m a quadruple-Scorpio?

She came back, then I went, and upon my return she asked me if I‘d like to smoke. I was out of cigarettes, so she offered me one of her Marlboro lights. I still can’t smoke one of those without reflecting on that evening. We smoked, we talked, and I was numb and wonderful. We drank water amidst the fumes and utterances and pleasant emotions that enveloped us.

She asked me if I’d liked it, and I shook my head in a most certain affirmative. I wasn’t sure if I was sure about anything else as much as I was sure how fucking beautiful that had been and how great I now felt. I’d glimpsed beyond the horizon of the morbid state I’d been stuck in the last four years and had seen what could be. I felt entirely cleansed and energized. I felt as if I had gone into the depths of the dreariest sleep, and had suddenly been awakened — as if I had gone into the deepest pits of hell, and then been given transcendence -‘ as if I’d gone through the bridge of death, crossed it, and came out reborn as something new.

They call sex the little death, and I finally knew why.

“You know,” she said as she exhaled a stream of smoke, with a sly little smile dominating her face, “for a guy who doesn’t believe in god, you sure call out his name a lot.”