dreamstate writing 11 May 2018

During much of this morning’s dream I was worming my way through the hallways and staircases of a vast series of interlocking, cliff-mounted structures. Sometimes I was alone, and sometimes hordes of other people crowded into the structures’ rooms, making it hard for me to move around. I was trying to get from one disc golf tee-box to another, but these were spaced far apart from one another and the layout of the place was confusing, causing me to climb many stairs and squeeze down many tunnels built into and through the homes of the people living there. Each time I threw my discs, they sailed out of view. Although I knew were they had landed, I had a difficult time figuring out how to get there through the maze of interlocking buildings.

At one point, I was standing at the top of a staircase conferring with some of the people judging the event (or who were at least doing something officious). Turning around, I found the stairs behind me so impossibly packed with people that my only recourse for descending to the floor below was to jump out over the side of the railing and hand-carry myself on the outside edges of the individual steps to the floor below. As I reached the bottom my legs brushed against the stockinged feet of a lass resting with two other women on a couch. She immediately stripped her socks off whilst giving me evil looks, to which I responded (as I was walking out a nearby door) by mocking her concern for her striped and colorful socks, saying something like “My legs aren’t that dirty.”

Later in the dream sequences, I was in an alpine city built onto level ground that was covered with a few inches of slushy snow. Despite the presence of frozen precipitation I knew the city was on Bali, the Island of the Gods, somewhere high up the side of one of its towering volcanoes. The city was party ruined, many of its sparsely-placed high-rise buildings damaged or collapsed, but its streets were packed with cars, buses, and people attending to business. Twice whilst in the city I stepped up into a burnt-out single-family home in which stood a representation of my deceased father, an older man with grey hair but strong arms and big hands who embraced me in a great hug and asked why I was groaning in pain and weeping loudly. (After the second time meeting the older man I indeed lay awake in bed crying, hugging myself about the chest, and basking in the memory of those who have died before me.) Falling back asleep, I found myself sitting in the slushy snow talking to a bypassing woman wearing a tan overcoat, who had stopped to admonish me to seek a drier place to sit lest I catch the sniffles.

The thick wool socks I was wearing, though they like the rest of me sat in mounds of cold wet, were nonetheless bone dry, which to my dream-consciousness seemed slightly odd.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

meeting uncle Ho

In March, 2016, my third attempt to see Ho Chi Minh was a success. I’d tried twice before then, but the first time I wasn’t wearing pants or close-toed shoes, and the second his mausoleum was closed. An intrepid young lady and I had left our Hanoi hostel early in order to arrive a few minutes before the shrine officially opened. We got to the grounds, walked through the unoccupied ticket booth, along the paved lanes, out into a large courtyard, and up to the very front of the line.

To our left rose the leader’s black-marble resting place. Ceremonial guards in white uniforms stood at its corners, guarding the entrance too. A man with a clipboard who was setting up queuing barriers looked over at us, glanced briefly at our clothing, then gestured toward the entrance, which we took as an invitation for us to enter.

Moving from the bright hot morning sun to the cool dark interior was fairly shocking, but we kept our composure and climbed the marble stairs. At each landing stood two white-clad guards at rigid attention. We took a right into the central chamber and caught our first glimpse of the deceased patriot lying within his glass and metal sarcophagus. In the viewing chamber with us were at least six guards. My companion and I were walking around the preserved statesman when an urge came over me and I paused, briefly, to give Ho Chi Minh a full bow from the spot where viewing him seemed best. As I was closing my eyes with my hands at my chest and beginning to bend forward, I saw the eyes of all visible guards go wide and snap onto me. The need to honor Vietnam’s erstwhile leader satisfied, my friend and I then quietly exited and went to find breakfast

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan