or jungle beyond

(dream-state writing March 2016)

I spend Balinese New Year's Day, or Nyepi, house-sitting my friend's villa in Umalas, north Kuta. During the day of silence I do yoga, meditate, play video games, contemplate my place in the universe, and star-gaze. The next morning, after having scaled the wall into his own compound, he wakes me up by banging on the downstairs room's door, whereupon I stumble out of bed mumbling apologies in Indonesian. Mightily groggy and feeling a strong tug to keep dreaming, I decline his invitation to have a morning surf, pack my few belongings, and head back to Canggu Permai. As the morning is hot, I turn on the air-conditioning, wait for the room to cool down a bit, then crawl under my light blanket, tossing and turning a few times before I fall back asleep. My ensuing dreams are recorded here, to the best of memory.

A convoy of vehicles and pedestrians is making its way along an elevated roadway that runs through both unkempt plots and well-maintained rice paddies. I am pushing a bicycle piled high with goods of some sort, but realize that I forgot my flip-flops on the road behind me, let my bicycle drive itself, and sprint-hover (a form of locomotion I often experience in my dreams, a type of bouncing that allows me to cover large distances quickly) back along the left-hand side of the road. My feet do not sting or hurt as I hurry along although the road is made of pitted and crumbling paving stones. As I am passing a number of shiny cars (whose drivers are staring straight ahead and not making eye-contact with me), a part of my conscious mind wonders why the convoy is still moving even though I had just abandoned my bike. As soon as I slip into my thongs, the dream changes. I have a vague memory of bartering for a coconut, which I drink, leaving the spoon that came with it on the edge of the now-deserted causeway, whereupon I remember a few elements of bartering for the coconut from a woman standing amidst heaps of rubble and broken houses by the side of the cobble-stone road. Still carrying the coconut, I reach a break in the elevated roadway, which has for some time been running alongside deep, stone pits filled with crystal-clear water. Leaning over the barrier installed above the break, I look down to find a pagoda (wooden pillars, roof of fired red tiles with adorned ridges) floating in the water, which is blocking mounds of water-borne trash from entering a lake on my right. Ahead of the break is no elevated roadway insight, only an open field of dry earth with a darkened wood, or jungle, beyond. I hurl my coconut down onto a slab of broken concrete, but instead of breaking it bounces out of sight. Moving carefully through the rubble, I make my way down the right side of the elevated roadway and step onto the pagoda, which tilts and begins to sink under my weight, whereupon some loose bits of plastic and other trash wash over my feet. I look down into the clear water and see great seams in the sunken rocks, as if it had been built by man. As I step off of the pagoda onto dry land, the dream changes again.

Next, I'm in a courtyard paved with gray stones. It has buildings on three sides of it and a wrought-iron, sliding gateway to my right. I'm facing a row of planting boxes in which are growing bushes and small trees. In front of me is a basin filled with water. In my hand is a piece of an engine which I am taking apart with a knife. I am using a short-bladed knife to cut away at the piece, which suddenly resembles a carburetor made entirely of rubber, and when I have sliced it in two, a reptile pokes its head of out the piece in my left hand. Standing up, I dump the piece in the basin of water, which I can see is about 2 meters deep, nearly 1 meter square, and lined with white, porcelain tiles. Bending over to look into the basin I see a large frog (possibly female) whose limbs are strong and human-shaped, dressed in a brightly-colored kimono decorated with the image of an Asiatic woman holding a parasol. The frog is also wearing a traditional Chinese scholar's hat, complete with red tassel; it turns to look at me, then kicks its legs and swims deeper into the basin, allowing me a full glimpse of the colorful image imprinted on the kimono. There are 5 or 6 other frogs in the basin as well as some swirling debris. The frogs are all past the tadpole stage but their rear legs are of different sizes. All have long flaps of skin that connect front to hind legs, in the manner of butterfly wings. I reach into the basin and pull out a bit of debris, a length of furry vegetation that I throw into the yard behind me. Excited at the sight of the kimono, I exit the yard through the gate and call to my neighbor, a blond woman, to come see, but she for some reason cannot get past the gate – her long dress keeps getting stuck on a hook of some sorts on the other side of the gate. The dream changes.

The next thing I remember is sitting in the lobby of what looks like a hospital. There's a counter to my left, a door behind me, a door to my left, a door in front of me, and another, larger door to my right. Through the large door on the right I can see sunlight as well as people and cars coming and going. Across from me are two rows of chairs with three seats each set up so they are facing each other. Five or six people are sitting there, but I can only make out a man sitting cross-legged on a seat closest to me, on the right-hand row. I'm on the phone with some sort of customer service representative, a woman, who asks for my new phone number, whereupon I start trying to find it while yelling into the phone's mouthpiece for her to be patient. At that point, the cross-legged man starts yelling louder and louder until I become annoyed enough to hang up my phone and confront him. I am not aware of walking across to him, only that I'm suddenly standing over him. The five other people seated there with him are only dimly visible. He looks away from me, down to the right, and I realize that he's yelling pure gibberish, non-sense sounds, whilst flapping his jaw in an exaggerated fashion that mimics talking. Taken aback at his offensive behavior, I lean away, whereupon he looks back up at me. His torso and legs are blurry but I can see his face and arms more clearly. He has reddish hair with a somewhat bloated and freckled face that looks a bit like my own, and his right arm is tattooed almost entirely with elaborate tribal designs, though his left arm has but few tattoos. At that point, I wake up, feeling refreshed.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

behind the central

My alarm in the waking world sounds at 7 a.m., but a part of me really wants to go back to sleep. I can sense a chasm of promise awaiting me back in Morpheus's grasp, a pit of pregnant nothingness that must be explored. After getting up to shut off the alarm I go back to bed, roll over onto my side, and slip immediately into dreaming. Twice more I wake up, each time the pull of the chasm, the nothingness, less strong but still present. When I finally awake feeling rested, memories of my dreams linger. They are recorded here.

I'm on a bus that has no roof driving through a brightly sunny landscape, sitting toward the rear, just behind the central doors. It's unclear to me where we're going but I recognize features outside and feel the journey has purpose. A few other persons (4, excluding the driver) are on the bus, also, all toward the front, all with their backs turned toward me, although I can tell they are aware of my presence. The bus slows to a halt in the middle of some featureless scrub and 2 more persons clamber aboard. They sit next to and slightly behind me. I turn to look at them. They are talking to each other and both are in military uniforms of sort. Neither of their uniforms bear insignia. Further from me is a woman with curly blond hair and an attractive but acne-scarred face wearing a light blue shirt, dark blue long pants, and a black belt. Closer to me is man in what could be Marine Corps blues. He has closely-cropped dark hair and his seemingly crippled hands are raised in front of his chest, fingers curled and spread wide. His eye-sockets are scarred and sunken pits devoid of eyeballs. He asks me what branch of the service I'm in, and I tell him something akin to 'I've never served.' The two talk to each other for a while and when I look back, the woman is sitting a row further back, low in the seat with her crotch thrust forward. I imagine briefly if I have a chance to make sex to her but the notion evaporates immediately.

The bus accelerates. We're driving down a snow-covered dirt track through a wintry scrub landscape at high speed and I remark at the driver's skill in negotiating the narrow and hilly path. I can see fresh tire-marks in the snows that cover the road. We pass a road-marker for the 'York Historical Society,' a bronze plaque atop an iron post that features a picture of an old barn or covered bridge. I'm speaking with the service-members about where I come from, explaining to them that I was in a sad place for a long time, much like the town the bus is driving into. The road is lined with boarded-up houses, burned-out cars, and weedy lawns. Because of an obstruction up ahead, the bus driver stops, reveres, and is doing a 3-point-turn when he runs us into one of the houses, cracking its barn-like sliding door. At that point I awake, refreshed.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on Vietnamese hitchhiking

A woman flags me down at the top of a mountain. Her name is Bom Gom. I pick her up at the apex of the Hai Van Pass in central Vietnam, or, rather, she climbs on the back of my motorcycle once we've established that I'm driving into Da Nang. A few women come running out of the nearby shops, waving their hands and shaking their heads, indicating she should climb back down, but Bom Gom dismisses them and slaps me on the ribs, telling me to go. She is at least 70 years old and just over half as tall as me, and while we're driving down the rain-slicked and twisty mountain roads, she keeps rummaging around in her handbag and yanking at my poncho. I think it's somewhat strange that this old hitchhiker has trusted me to transport her safely into town, but I cannot see what she is rummaging for, and figure if she stabs me or something, she too will be injured in the fall. “Children?” she asks. “No, no children.” We laugh. Then it's into some sharp cutbacks, which I've never negotiated before, and our halting conversation stops. Through the rising mists I see promontories and beaches spreading along the coastline far below, but cannot risk more than a glance for fear of hitting a pothole and crashing. We enter the outskirts of Da Nang city, cement plants and tiny shops, a school, some houses. A few minutes down a divided highway Bom Gom slaps me on the shoulder, saying “Stop, stop.” I down-shift and pull over, and when she gets off, she says, “Now, you give me one dollar. I have no food today, no money. One dollar.” With a chuckle and a shake of my head, I hand over a little more than the requested sum, thirty thousand Dong, then bid farewell with a butchered “Hen Gap Lai.” The old woman walks away, I insert my swastika-shaped key into the swastika-shaped keyhole, start up my rented motorbike, and continue on, heading south.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥