Last night I was running around in dreamland, preparing for the floods as usual. Dreamland usually looks the same, and has a similar chain of events occuring. I remember more and more of what happens every morning. This morning I remembered sitting at a bus stop. A shadow man with a black hat and crooked teeth walked up to me and said, “sleep.” Immediately, I fell into a deep paralysis. He slithered up to my ear and asked, “what is your name?”
“What the fuck?” I thought. “This demon is really trying to trick me in my own dreamland.” I shook the paralysis and whispered an answer to his question.
“Ben” was the lie I offered him before opening my eyes, winking at him, and skipping away. He slithered right back to my ear and bellowed, “sleep!” Frustration and confusion caused his voice to raise so loud that the ground shook. “SLEEP!” He tried again.
“That’s not how this works.” I told him as I giggled. I turned around to face the shadow man. Holding my left hand in front of me as if I was holding a serving tray, I said, “look.” He looked down at my open palm to see a tiny version of himself. As soon as he saw it he became it. “Oh shit.” He said looking up at a giant version of me holding him in my palm. “You don’t want to go with weak commands like sleep, it works better with major transitions like…die.” I told him as I swung my right hand down on the left. WHAP! Squashed that trickster like a bug. Dead.
I woke up feeling defeated and beat the fuck up. I remembered this dream, but it’s not the dreams I remember that haunt the waking world. It’s the ones that escape my consciousness that shock me out of alignment. “Bash your head, bash your head, bad Al, kill them all, how could you have done that, you’re so dumb and it will be your downfall. You piece…of…shit!” Sadness and embarrassment. I didn’t want to spend all day angry. What do you do when everything you want to do has grave consequences? Yes, obviously you try really hard not to do any of the things you’re fantasizing about. But what do you do?
This morning, I ran. I figured that running to the river and back would be helpful in taking my focus away from how wound up I felt. Worried that my irritability would land me in jail if I engaged with the outside world, I decided to stay relatively close to home. It was cold outside. I was angry. For no reason. Which made me more frustrated. “How can you be angry when everything is going well!?” I chastised myself then tried to find comfort. “Demons in the night.” I thought, “they come, they’ll go.” Preceded by a tornado of chatter, “you’ll never escape, you will always come back here, just as you always have. To this feeling. To these thoughts. And these desires. Forever. So just do it. Burn it all down.” I giggled as I let myself enjoy some revenge fantasies for a moment.
“Ok now run. Just run. Focus on nothing. And just breathe,” I thought as my feet began moving to the beat. The chatter slowed. My heart started pounding deep and heavy, replacing the sound of the chatter entirely. I was never scared. The new beat felt like it was pounding ecstasy through my body. Until I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I opened up my mouth and roared. My feet picked up, taking me faster and faster over the pavement.
My upper lip curled back as I ran my tongue over my long pointy front teeth. I rubbed my arms. They were, like the rest of my new body, huge. Never did I stop running. This form was so strong and fast, and having so much fun, there was no reason to stop. Fur short and black, I looked as good as I felt. I roared again so the world would know. As if they didn’t already. The amount of power that resides inside. The roar called in more family members. Until an innumerable amount of giant gorillas were coalescing on our second line through the city. Some were swinging through the trees. Others were dancing on top of houses. The baby gorillas were even strong enough to pull street posts out of the ground like toothpicks to use as dancing props.
What started as an angry run, became a whole vibe. The gorillas to my left were playing drums hanging from their necks, the gorillas to my right were dancing with the baby gorillas, and the baby gorillas were tearing shit up. In front of us was a pristine jungle, draped with the trappings of a remote African hideaway, behind us was a beat up city street that appeared to have been recently bombed. As things go in the city world, the police eventually pulled up in an attempt to sequester the magic.
They circled our tribe, pulled out automatic weapons, and began unloading their arsenal at us. The baby gorillas laughed. Skin unharmed by the cops’ weapons, the smallest of the babies stepped forward. She grew to five times her previous size, dwarfing the tribe, police, and all of the buildings in the city. With the step of one big baby gorilla foot, the entire New Orleans police department was squashed like a bug, dead. All the while, the gorillas to my left never stopped playing the drums, the gorillas to my right never stopped dancing, and the other baby gorillas never stopped tearing shit up.
The godzilla baby gorilla shrank back down to normal giant baby gorilla size. She came up to me after killing the police with her foot and said, “We’re going back to the jungle now. We love you, summon the tribe whenever! When you feel like you can’t do the things you need to do, you know…we always can!” My feet slowed to human speed. I rubbed my arms, they were back to human size. I felt my heartbeat return to a human rhythm. My human eyes looked around, there were no gorillas to be seen. “What the fuck was that Al, you’re bat shit crazy now, you can’t even go running without hollucinating about becoming a giant gorilla who joins a tribe of other giant gorillas who unmeaningly take down the cops!?” The chatter began. I growled, frustrated at how soon it returned.
The deep gorilla growl reignited the power. I rubbed my tongue over my long pointy front teeth. Then giggled some more before I roared from my belly at the forgotten demons from the night. The whispers of cruel chatter. The ones who come and go in the fog, leeching energy from our friction filled actions in the day. Actions fueled from the lies they plant into our subconscious while in hypnotic states like dreamland.
What do you do when everything you want to do has grave consequences? Make your own world you and do what you want to.
ALways ONE never ALONE 