Life, Dreams and Magical Landscapes
Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Kali Amanda Browne
Copyright 2011
Smashwords Edition, Licensing Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
”Life, Dreams and Magical Landscapes” is a collection of stories, poems, dreams and journal entries written between 1997 and 2007 but covering a wider space of time.
Its sole purpose: to elevate words to mental images that defined us at different periods of our lives.
The use of the royal we here is not conceit but evidence that with every entry a different person can be identified, because we all grow and develop into different people as we mature.
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
A zombie jamboree in Vancouver
Acts
of God
Sunset
on Blueberry Pond
Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
Seldom, if ever, have I've said anything that has been met by an impenetrable wall of stunned silence when in the company of Marie and Tracy. But that's exactly what happened the day after Thanksgiving.
Tracy had invited us over for left-over turkey (that was our tradition in the days we were chummy). We, of course, accepted. It always ended up being a lovely evening.
We've been friends with Tracy for almost ten years. She became virtual family. We used to tell people we were sisters -- different father and mother, but sisters nonetheless. Some folks used to get really confused about that!
We evolve, matured, survived and endured together for a better part of a decade. We partied, we hung out, and we got in trouble together. We laughed, cried, embraced and accepted each other -- warts, boyfriends and all.
At least that was my perspective for a very long time. I was wrong. But perspective is everything and, at the time, we were a coven.
We were standing around Tracy's kitchen preparing the feast and talking, having a cocktail and smoking. I mentioned that the very morning I’d had a very disturbing dream. So twisted a dream, I told them, that I got up, went to the bathroom and sat there for minutes – refusing to return to bed.
Tracy said, "Well, no problem! We'll just decipher it, I have a book..." With this, she quickly left the room and returned with one of her dream interpretation books in hand.
Marie and Tracy stood and listened to the tale of my dream:
The setting is a small bedroom. There's a fat, white kid in his late teens, holding a big, furry cat in his arms. He doesn't even look up as he grabs the cat's head and twists its neck. He throws the dead cat aside. He then puts a gun to his head, closes his eyes and shoots; very dark red blood spurts out of his closed mouth and cascades down his chin and a trickle falls down his cheek.
An old and gray woman (her skin was literally gray) walks up to the body from an unseen side of the room. The body is still upright. The lady pulls a switch and says something to the body about turning on a magnetizer or some such nonsense.
A light comes on above and the body levitates towards the ceiling, the light shining down on it. The boy is obviously lifeless, his eyes remain closed and his hair droops. The blood looks wet and thick, and it looks slightly tack as it isn't moving far where it had been.
Then the boy opened his eyes and said, “Dance!"
A merengue starts playing -- I made out plenty of trumpets and distinctly heard the beat of several drums. The song is an anti-suicide dance anthem, if there ever was such a thing.
There are little kids in the back of the room, where the old lady came from. The children are in black and white, but the room, the boy and the light are in color – as if they exist in different dimensions.
The children are watching the teacher, who was singing along for a while but whom I can't see anymore. They look a bit apprehensive, I somehow feel the boy who killed himself was holding them hostage -- but I don't know how I know this.
I don't recall the words well, but the essence of the song was "Suicide: Just don't it! Dance!"
That's exactly how the music ended.
The kids stopped singing. The orchestra stopped playing. The room and everything began to fade to black. In the background I heard a CNN newscast announcing the "baffling, unexpected suicide of actress, activist and physical fitness guru, Jane Fonda."
That was my dream and the story I told Marie and Tracy.
Marie stood there like a rock, holding her cigarette. Not blinking. Tracy just looked at me -- not really alarmed or anything, just immovable.
We were like that for minutes. Don't exactly know how many minutes. It felt like two eternities intertwined into two miserably long parallel realities. Like I said, seldom, if ever, have I've said anything that has been met by an impenetrable wall of stunned silence when in the company of Marie and Tracy.
But that's exactly what happened. I did warn them it was twisted and scary.
Finally, Tracy breathed in heavily and sighted. Mom exhaled audibly, but not loudly. Tracy set down the book, rather sharply, on the kitchen counter.
"Nope!” Tracy said. “There's nothing in there that's gonna help. I don't think that book is advanced enough!"
She walked past me towards Marie, whose only comment was, "Jesus Christ!"
Later Marie told me that the night before Thanksgiving she couldn't sleep for hours because I was having a "psychotic episode" in my dream.
Apparently in the space of several hours I huffed and puffed, moaned, groaned, growled, cackled, threw punches, screamed, giggled, struggled as if being held in bondage -- again and again until I finally sighted and stopped.
I still have no idea what, if anything, can be read of all that. Thinking back on it, it really ran like a music video, disjointed from my other dreams from that evening.
The merengue was sung in English, which to me seems unnatural, at best. I don't know who the kid was. I'd never seen his cat. The old lady didn't come to make things easier for me (the symbolic purpose of the hag). And then there was the blood, not necessarily a favorite of mine.
It was like looking deeply into someone else's lunacy and I felt uncomfortable being that close to it and staring it in the face.
More importantly, I wonder, what has that dream done to the collective unconscious?
Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.
Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower
or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets,
but I have found that when I silently commune
with people they give up their secrets also –
if you love them enough."
- George Washington Carver
My grandmother had this two-trunk set in her bedroom.
It was on of those old trunks people would use on long train trips -- like Marilyn Monroe’s trunks on "Some Like it Hot." Titanic-style trunks, Old World dowry type of trunks.
The inside was cedar wood. Outside they were a combination of leather, copper studs and buckles. I have no idea how long those had been in the family. I think those trunks may have been the very same my great grandmother took with her on her voyage up North back in the 1920s.
My grandmother kept her good linens in there. And important papers -- like my confirmation papers. She kept her photographs in there too. Frozen bits of a life I never knew, and of people I never knew, but whose image I grew so familiar and eventually intimate with; so much so that the very images are now embedded in my psyche. Her good jewelry also resided in her trunk.
This was the official home for her things.
The house was my grandfather’s and everything in it, including the clothes on her back. Sometimes he made it point to clarify that fact for anyone who’d listen. He could claim the whole of the New World, but inside the trunk lay *her* things.
I was her shadow, following her adoringly everywhere she went, during my toddler years. When we went into her room, I’d climb on their bed and just watch her.
When I saw the toiletries and the comb set come off the trunk, I’d sit up in expectation, knowing that the doily was next. I’d be the keeper of the doily. Then she’d let me see everything that was in her trunk.
She’d let me touch some things and study others.
I wonder if my love of paper comes from all the old and weathered papers that emerged from that trunk. I wonder if my love of history also comes from the stories she’d tell me of the people, places and the times of the photographs.
The love for jewelry, I think, is genetic. She’d sometimes put on a little rouge on her cheeks, and a tiny amount on me, and we’d “parade” in her good jewelry around her bedroom.
In a sense, that was the only fantasy play we engaged in. I remember her once telling me that when she died I could have all her jewelry. I was probably closer to three then.
I had no idea what death was, but it was impeding me from playing with some primo stuff. So, imprudently yet innocently I inquired, “When are you gonna die so I can have your jewelry?”
I remember laughter, tears and some other psychotic behavior going on around me. When she calmed herself down, she sat me down and explained that if she died she’d be gone and not be able to be with me ever, ever again.
She said this as if I understood the concept of never. All I got was that she didn’t want to part with the toys, so I gracefully bowed out, “Okay, fine. You keep it then.” And with that, went my merry way to go on playing with my own toys.
I think that we were never as in love with one another as we were those days. Sometime around five, she’d already lost me. I knew I wanted to be nothing like the doormat she was to my grandfather: A slave to her emotions; needy.
I was harsher then, and my opinion of her didn’t improve much until I was an adult. Even at my most pissed, I never stopped loving her but I thought that was a weakness.
I’ve since forgiven her for being human, for being just a woman and one who loved her significant other almost as much as she did when she was sweet 16.
Without him she may be a little lonely, but she blossomed into a very interesting woman. A new woman! She was happy and funny, and more adventurous than she’d been for a lifetime. Until the Alzheimer’s robbed her of her memories and us of the matriarch we knew.
Then a hurricane robbed us all of the trunks and their contents.
The last time I went home, a decade ago, she took me into the master bedroom and started taking the comb set off the trunk. I could feel excitement build around us! As she slid the doily aside and handed it to me, I felt like I did as a three year old, waiting to see the wondrous bounty that hid from view.
The contents of the trunk were hers alone, but I shared in its secrets with my grandmother.
Image: SweetCrisis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I couldn't have been more than three years old.
I was running around like a crazy little woman. I was playing newspaper, by myself. I had a tiny pad that my grandmother had allowed me to keep. In it, I'd scratched some incomprehensible pencil "notes." My grandfather had also given me one of his old drafting pencils, stubby and dull.
I was a roving reporter. I had my Mickey Mouse squirt camera and ran around taking my fake pictures. See, I was a serious photojournalist, and ready to follow my story, write it and photograph it for my loyal readers (who were also my subjects as it turns out).
Riding around in circles on my tricycle, I called out, "Extra! Extra! San Juan Star!" (Note: The SJS was Puerto Rico's only English newspaper for many, many years.) So I also delivered the paper. But not before playing my entire production phase because I was rather meticulous for a toddler.
I was a tiny Renaissance woman.
I remember seeing what looked like a crack on the wall outside the kitchen. I saw it every time I rounded the garden, maniacally and a dizzying speed. At some point I noticed that the crack, as it curved and winded.
In fact, it appeared to be moving. I saw movement! Perhaps it was nothing more than a glistening. I got off my tricycle, put down my pad, pencil, and the Sunday comics section of the paper (which is what I was playing with while I pulled the Essential Brenda Starr).
I approached the wall slowly. I was cautious but eager. I stood at the wall and watched as dozens of ants made a trail up the wall up to the window and into the kitchen.
I knew where they were going, but what were they and where did they come from? I had never seen anything like that before.
I followed the trail backwards and they seemed to be coming from the earth near the guava tree, but it wasn't easy to make them out once they were off the pavement. They seemed to blend in with the dirt.
I bent down and used the backs of my legs as cushions and watched them move in one long and winding lane, with nothing bothering them. I breathed easy so as to not disturb them, but on one occasion I did breathe hard on them and caused quite a panic in the line.