Sleep paralysis. Lying on my back in the bed. Alarmed. Hearing my dog on one side of the bed, then the other, just the small noises that a small dog makes, his collar's faint clinking. Open my eyes. Am I dreaming. Is this a false awakening. Then I see my man's form to the right of me. He's standing. Nude, indistinct. That field of fear still holds me. Some impulse towards things must be normal prompts me to say, Hi baby. I say it, and as soon as I give that greeting, he slides forward. It takes less than a second. He slides forward. He inclines over me. His face is next to my face. His face slips into mine. His chest into mine. His body into mine. It takes less than a second. His body or spirit is now inside me. How will this narrative go. He's dreaming of me. Or, his spirit is possessing me. Or, in the night he wants to be with me.



Junior the dragonfly on my hand. He's a small, tan bug, with unremarkable wings, but in the shape of a dragonfly. I toss a cube of bread on the floor and he dives on it. A dream companion comes in. Gentle, elliptic conversation about the level of interaction one has with a friendly insect. But to start with, need to clear up my companion's mistaken assumption. He asks if Junior is this bug, opening a box the size of a shoebox on a low shelf or table. The bug is a handsome one, an inch and a half long, with striking black shell. But this racy looking black bug is not built for aerodynamic grace like Junior. I manage to find the easily camouflaged Junior near the bread on the floor and point him out.



Which apartment we'll stay in, since we're here for the short term. The tour of the communal apartment building begins with the first floor, with its expanse of solid, old wooden tables. There must be an industrial sized kitchen where many people spend hours every day on the other side of the first floor. I'm given the explanation of the community cooking that happens for every meal. They both seek whole ingredients, such as whole wheat flour to make bread, and also must take whatever is given, like a food bank, they spurn nothing, not even processed and packaged foods. For every meal, they work together so that everyone can have a plate of food.

But we're staying in this apartment. Baroquely packed with lush indoor plants and treasures. Must remember how beautiful it is to have the space filled with greenery and found objects. Walking through a downstairs lobby, more of a chamber, really. This is the second time I've seen poodle-like dogs, shaggy, tan, on the small side, in this interior. They're hanging out like they belong here. I'll see another pair of them a little later. There behind those plants and bench, that really is a rectangular, pale yellow stone basin filled with clear, still water, the length of a tall person, even. What an assortment of decorating and functional elements. How long this must have been accumulating, how long the residents must have been here.

Walking up the stairs to the apartment where we're staying. An exterior, concrete stairway, dotted with planters. Along come some other people, residents of the building. Their presence makes me nervous, not wanting to reveal that I'm not truly sure of which floor I belong on. So I go all the way up to the roof garden. One woman gives me the eyebrows concerned aside about how the area is so risky and low-rent. Puzzling, since I've seen large, character-filled living spaces, with many plants and even antiques in common areas. From here I can look down and see the common dining area tables of the building where the poor people live. Some of the tables spill outside. They not only help each other to be fed, they also eat their meals in an open air setting. How can she feel threatened by being near such a cooperative group? I don't see any evidence of crime or neglect anywhere.



In the antique apparatus filled room, we're acting out the capture and evil genius murder. I'm in the role of the captive in distress. The genius, with his flyaway hair and thick glasses, tells me to sit here, put my hands into these manacles. He fires a cannon of dissolving rays at me. He nearly misses, twice. It's like that in the script. He's menacing, yet bumbling. But things build, as they tend to in these scenarios. And ultimately, after he's ordered me to a cramped seat lodged between two big cabinets or trunks, he's firing the really powerful cannon at me. It looks like it's aimed straight at me, this time. And when I see the smoke wisping off of it, and he makes the striking motion with his arm, I can't help it. I cringe and close my eyes. Darn, I missed it. I ask him if he'll rewind. He looks a little discomfited, but agrees. I get settled again in my captive perch. Now a few people come in to watch. I'm thinking I look pretty good. These images might start a surprise acting career for me.


~~~~~~~~~

Poking around the current Wikipedia entry on sleep paralysis, I found this passage. I love the idea of the conflict between the earthly spouse and a spiritual spouse. Such conflicts must always be occurring, in the long tale of integration between what we marry on earth and what we marry in spirit. Perhaps I have eaten my spiritual spouse, in my dream of him dissolving into me. Perhaps he nourishes me and gives me strength.

"Ogun Oru is a traditional explanation for nocturnal disturbances among the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria; ogun oru (nocturnal warfare) involves an acute night-time disturbance that is culturally attributed to demonic infiltration of the body and psyche during dreaming. Ogun oru is characterized by its occurrence, a female preponderance, the perception of an underlying feud between the sufferer's earthly spouse and a 'spiritual' spouse, and the event of bewitchment through eating while dreaming. The condition is believed to be treatable through Christian prayers or elaborate traditional rituals designed to exorcise the imbibed demonic elements.[19]"

1.  Aina OF, Famuyiwa OO (2007). "Ogun Oru: a traditional explanation for nocturnal neuropsychiatric disturbances among the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria". Transcultural psychiatry 44 (1): 44–54. doi:10.1177/1363461507074968. PMID 17379609.

I've the book in my hands. I've been presented as the reader of the poem. How to interpret this cerebral, obscure, layered text. It will be incomprehensible. I give a short history of the meaning of Aaztlán (SP) and the Chicano movement. A part of North America that is not now part of Mexico, but long ago... They'll be impressed by my knowledge. It's also incumbent upon me to give a short history of the ephemeral print history of this book, its publication by Weird Tales. Perhaps this context will help them when the words begin to spill out.

Turning the pages, looking for the text. Page that is a leaf. Page that is part lace doily. My eyes will find the right page. Flipping. Tiny, dense, square type.

As reader, I stand on a low dais in front of wood and glass panelled doors that can open and close. People will mostly enter the space behind me and to my right. The seating, large, carpet covered steps, rises in front of me and to my right. Gentle, diffuse, pooled lighting.

The audience is bound to shift, drift in behind me as I read. And they'll leave, too. Can they really want to hear this reading, which will surely go over their heads. I speak to them, take an informal poll of their desire to hear poetry or do readings themselves. I request information about time constraints. Surprisingly, the majority is intent on hearing the poem.

I return to the task of finding the text among the pages so crammed with type, brown and brittle with age.

The broken space inside me. The walls. The spread. Say the words I associate with the image. Say them in the order my eyes move across the objects in the drawing. This is how this image is read. Or better, simply describe the whole of the image in my own words. This is how the image is read. I have been used to the poem being the precise words of the author. But these images can be described in whatever words the reader chooses.

As reader, I stand in my damaged feet in loose, white, cotton socks on a wood floor. Lucky I can't feel my feet. In front of wood and glass panelled doors. Audience members drift in and out. More joining than departing.

Horses burst through doors in front of me and to my left. Dappled white gray horses. The listeners up in front of me and to my right are still attending to what I'm reading. The exuberance of the sports enthusiasts outside can't be quelled. The crowd roars. Tremendous haunches, backs decorated in red and gold. Prancing hooves.



~~~~~~~~~

Balancing being a body and exploring the life of the mind.

This is how you use the magic medicine, she says. The new plastic bottle of amber liquid, covered from top to bottom with a white label full of black print. Now is a good time. There's a full moon in Czechoslovakia, so the time is right. I'll have to buy a little book that lists the positions of the planets throughout the year, so I will be able to know what times to choose to employ the medicine. She didn't even need to refer to a book.

You put this in your mouth. My tongue senses slippery and hard, two parts held together by delicate cord, one larger than the other, a solid but raw organ of some small animal. I'm embarrassed to have dead animal in my mouth, and I feel ashamed to have given up being vegan so easily. And you need to swallow it next to your address. Does she mean on the steps in front of where I live. Where is that. An apartment building with names typed in black on white paper next to an old-fashioned buzzer system with black buttons? Maybe if I write out my address and lie down near the paper. It's tough holding it in my mouth. I want to swallow. Do I wash it down with the liquid in the bottle. Oh, one half went down my throat. Salivating with the effort of not swallowing the larger part.

Do you feel that? she asks me. Her facial expression directs my attention behind me. I turn, still seated in the chair at the table I share with her, and see that the other woman is giving birth. Her question meant did I feel the glowing energy that she is able to sense radiating from the birth. I can't feel the energy the way she does, and it occurs to me that I could lie, oh sure I feel it, but I decide to simply not answer. Two men stand over the woman giving birth on the sofa, a father and brother. She makes the sounds of giving birth, but the pain doesn't sound as extreme as it usually is. After a few pushes, she makes a larger sound and her head arches back, her face contorted more in pleasure than in pain.

She's had the baby. That last push moved it out of her. She stands up from the sofa, smiling, and her blue granny dress covers her. There's no sign that she's just had a birth experience. Wow, I say to the woman who's giving me the medicine, how are you gonna top that? Because she's pregnant, too, and will give birth soon. And she will naturally feel the need to compete with the speed and ease of the birth we've just witnessed.

First Wrathful She-Khan and then Sonreído enter and stand near the table. WSK tells me that Sonreído has finished his opus. I'm moved and pleased. I look at his smiling, relieved face and think of his thirty hours a week of work and his twenty hours a week of refining the magical, transformative elements of his creation, and try to formulate something to say to him about how amazing it must be for him to have the fruits of his dedication, how hard he worked.

Then we're outside, walking on the grass near the cliff down to the water, and I'm explaining to WSK how to take the medicine with your address. Do I have some paper and a pen so that we can write down her address.

They shouldn't even ask me to come out on a mission. It's during my scheduled off-duty time. Legs in front of a sofa ending in high heeled pumps. This negotiation over my going on the assignment is simply protocol. They ask and I go. My protest is the merest facesaving.

At the assignment. This woman and her daughter, what possible value can they have in the world of espionage? The mother's picked out a film she wants them to go see. This listing, this theater, this time. I shake open the newspaper pages, looking for times and venues. Here are a few showtimes and theaters where it's playing. Can't find the showing she pointed out. Oh, that showing was too far away, anyway, on the other side of the Beltway. There's some arranging to do to get them to one of these. But with me doing the arranging, it will be easier than it would be for these two, who are intimidated by the details of moving in the world, lost, impotent.

The mother is briefly a shadow of la bonita, who is a shadow of my mother.

Here out walking down the sidewalk on a quiet street with Mono and his friend, a slender Asian man in his thirties. We're all wearing sneakers and comfortable, baggy pants. This is hanging out. I'm ambling slightly behind them. I don't walk by Mono's side like I used to, because we're not together anymore. The shared mood is careless and relaxed, everything's okay. His silence is now without weight.

We pause in our walk next to a curbside planting strip. Bare earth and several varieties of clover. Mono's friend points them out. He is familiar with these three strains. One has rosemary-like leaves, but still topped by the white petal ball clover flower, although there are less blooms on the plant. I'll save these to plant in the spring. You can pull them out and the roots, if you keep them dry and cool, will stay dormant through the dark months when the earth is cold.

Maybe I shouldn't have pulled this one out. I try to replant it where the earth makes a vertical incline of a few inches up to the sidewalk surface. The earth is soft and dry, I press the hard, thin roots into the earth.

I'll ask Mono if he wants to share space with me in the patch of herbs I'm planting next summer. The green angel keeps telling me he's gotten more space and he'll plow a plot just for me. I'll have all these rare kinds of clover and epazote and basil. It will take some thought, figuring out how to plant them so that they get sunshine at the perfect times of the day. So the more delicate herbs are shaded by the ferocious, sun-hungry ones. So the sun hits their leaves just so. It starts warming from the outside of each small leaf and its light spreads to the center like from the top of the mountain down into the valley.

The clock is here on the sidewalk. Touching it, breaking it, or it might have already been broken. This is the clock I was glancing at when I was lounging and reading. The one clock in the house that was set an hour late. The clock that made me late to my espionage assignment. That was a farce, scrambling to get the blonde wig on. But then I got there and pretended everything was normal, and it seemed to turn out okay, although I have no idea of the objective.

In the women's living room in my spy role, and a text message appears on my phone from someone I know. I-5 is completely stopped because of the thousands of people massing on the overpass in protest. When I see them, the freeway looks like a portion of 84. The overpass is phenomenally high. I see the crowd teeming up there.

Down here below on a large unpaved, tree-shaded area off the highway, I see them. These are the animals whose suffering that has inspired the protest. The massive animals' dark hides are flecked with blood from many small cuts. Their feet are chained to the curved boards so they are forced to stand. Their bodies are rigidly chained so they cannot change position. As I walk around the end of the platform, I see the silver metal chain around the silverback gorilla's waist. The chain pulls up, so his feet are chained down and his waist is being pulled upwards.

The crew of Hispanic men move around the beasts. The silverback is chained so rigidly that they can turn him on his side and lift him. Is there no danger from his agonized jaws. How can they torture him like this. But this is how animals are treated everywhere.

This is what we do to animals.

Oh, please tell me that the protest, the spontaneous uprising, is not in denial of the situation of all animals. No, no, let it not be that the people are massing in racist hatred of these Hispanic men. That's like blaming the slaughterhouse on the poor men of color, Blacks, Latinos, who are oppressed there as workers.

An exchange between me and the man who lifted the silverback as if it were so much dead meat. The immobilized animal is much too large for this man, or any single man, to lift. I'll not face off with him. I'll move away, because it's not about him.

This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.

I run from the top of the bank of escalators. I run. There's another woman running on the other side of the corridor. We are underground. We reach the part where the ceiling is glass. The ocean is racing us across the glass ceiling. We run. She is not connected to the web of which I am a part. I am in a movement, part of a revolution. This is the apocalypse. Because of my connection, I have some responsibility towards her. I won't abandon her to this fear.

In the dream, high on the realization I've dreamt this before. This trope is part of my for so long unremembered dream universe. I am part of some clandestine integrated whole. White robes. A longing for transformation in history.

Small table. Social. English speakers talking about their life in Costa Rica. Their expat scene holds nothing for me. Slide into daylight ruminations on urban versus rural as home for me, longing to live in a country in the South.

The Cape Lookout beach. No sun. No source of light. Grey above and below. Dark and light shades of grey. I can't see the ocean. Under my feet, packed, flat sand. Ridges of pebbles and rocks. I hear the ocean over an incline. There is nothing but shadowy air, dark coarse sand, ribbons of small and large stones, the sound of the ocean. No seaweed, no plants, no garbage, no objects.

Was that where the sandy cliff and grasses were when I camped here for my birthday last summer? The winter storms hadn't yet washed the land barrier away. There was a cliff face then. I stood on it and looked down at the beach full of people. I walked down the steep walkway to the warm sand.

In this absence of light, I see a group of four or five people walking. One woman has a bandanna on her head, like in an old photograph of my mother on a windy beach in the early sixties. She's part of a group walking towards the water. Far ahead and far behind them are other groups.

I get closer, to the top of the low incline. The ocean is on the other side. It is wearing down everything. It has worn down everything. The land barrier was once here. Dark sand, dark pebbles, black rocks. The ocean churns. I walk north, in the direction we walked on our real world visit in the winter. The campground has all been worn away. The ocean has poured down night tides. The ocean has flowed over this small ridge. The ocean has flooded what was the campground.

I don't think I've seen it like this in sunlight and now it's all dark. I don't think it is night. It is neither night nor day. All is darkening. All is shading into black. Shiny black rocks rolling in the surf, smaller black rocks above that, coarse sand above that.

I walk along the surf. What I can see becomes thick, until the greyness everywhere is almost opaque. There is almost no difference between what would be the sky, if sky existed, and what would be ocean and land.



I wake up within the dream. there is a part of me that is very strong, very cold, very decisive, who says this is not a good idea. This is too strong, this is too cold. This is too dark. I am deciding to end this. It is not right. The iron will grey stone strength inside me is worried about my safety, but I don't worry because I am strong, I extend everywhere, I am relentless. An identity is surfacing from me. This will happen. It is this strong part of me. The stone grey part of me. That says: no.



I open one eye in the dream and see my bedroom in black and white. It is different, my visual perspective is not from where I am sleeping on the bed. A shade is open and some light comes through a curtain. My dream self sees my room in black and white from outside my body.



I woke up enough to know I had an alarm set to go off in twenty minutes. I went back to sleep. And I think then was when I had this following dream.




I am someone who might be someone like me or someone like la artista, walking along a small ledge along a stone wall or incline and above a river. I walk along what starts out as a pathway three times. Each time the path grows more and more narrow and then disappears into the stone wall. The third time, I look up and see that the real path is at the top of the wall on my right. I get it that I chose the low road, the easy path, not wanting to go up the hill, but that to continue along the river I have to go back once again and take the high road.



~~~~~~~~~

Death, loss, depression, and the strength that comes from having experienced sadness and grief. The ability to explore the underworld. The strength to look into the dark, to inhabit the dark. A gift to bring back to the world of light.

The shadow of the winged figure. I see its shadow all the way down.

It floats on the surface of the water.

A sculpted flat shape of a winged figure fighting another figure. Martial. Twelve or so feet across. Flatter than a bas relief. The color of orange rusted iron but thin, and it took the sculpting like a different kind of metal. Once fine detail blunted with age, with long exposure to the most irresistible solvent, water. The feathers, fine lines in the wings. Suitable for a shield, but not round. The silhouette formed by the reach of the outstretched wings.

Huge, ancient manmade pool. Stone edge, blocks of stone decayed in some places. Old trees with branches looming. Water clear like ripply glass, so the depths are visible. Bottom quarry-like in some places and smooth and sandy in some places. I can see every grain of sand.